"between 1,000 and 3,000 paintings"

Art Recently I wrote giddily about the addition of National Museums Liverpool's collection to the Your Paintings section on the BBC's website and had questions about how the project was pulled together.

 Well, a conference is happening at the beginning of April and amongst the speakers are a contingent from Your Paintings who'll present this paper explaining their motives and with plenty of technical detail on both the website and how the images were pulled together:

"The digitization programme involves two project teams. The first is the Field Team, comprising pairs of freelance researchers and photographers working together across the country. Central to this approach was the decision at the start of the project to divide the country into counties or regions (or sometimes single large collections) that had between 1,000 and 3,000 paintings. This was considered to be a reasonable number of paintings for a two-person team (researcher and photographer) to undertake over a twelve- to eighteen-month period.

"The second team is the Editorial and Production Team based in London, which is responsible for processing the images and data that are sent in from the field, clearing copyright, and ensuring that the images and data are ready to be put online."

Metadata was pulled together from Excel spreadsheets with information supplied by each venue. What's perhaps more interesting is the paintings were photographed with their frames and glaze which were then removed in post production.  Yes, interesting.

Meanwhile, I've also noticed the Royal Shakespeare Company's art collection has been added, a hundred and forty-one specimens including Cecil Beaton's portrait of David Warner.