some ideas

hi pod-member,

I was interested to see where you would take this fine arts entry; the archive/gallery distinction is one I hadn't really considered and was interested to read more about. You may want to focus more on traditional visual art like painting and sculpture rather than other forms like media art or digital or web art, but those provide some exciting challenges to art archive and digital preservation endeavors. Have you seen Rhizome's Art Base? It's an interesting archive of media art made from a variety technologies and formats; they do a lot of research in how to digitally preserve media art. http://rhizome.org/artbase/?ref=header Because I wasn't sure what type of fine or visual art you were focusing on, I looked up the terms to see the difference: fine arts contains painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry (according to Wikipedia), and visual arts include ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, filmmaking and architecture (also Wikipedia). It might be helpful to the reader to state what art archives traditionally consist of in the context of your page.

In the American and Canadian sections I would have loved to read about some examples of artists and works in various archives, so the reader gets an idea of what is being held by institutions in those countries. Might be an opportunity to bring some visuals in as well.

Hi Shyla,

Thanks for the comment. I had not heard of Rhizome's Art Base before. I will definitely check that out. I used your suggestion of explaining what the term "fine arts" and "visual arts" is usually used to represent, as well as provide a reasoning on why I have chosen to use "visual arts" more consistently throughout the page. In some ways, it seems similar to the whole argument between what constitutes "high art" and "low art." Personally, I think it is an arbitrary distinction, based on what one person or a group of people determine to be "good," but, of course, this is always subjective. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks again for your suggestions and comments

hi, it does seem to provide a bit of useful context at the beginning, I like the introduction. The other thing I would suggest is to remove the colons (:) after the headers. I don't think they are necessary on top of the formatting that already distinguishes them, and end up being a bit distracting for the reader. At least for me, anyways. Good luck with the final week of work...