Future proofing the Gallery

WHILE closed to the public, Art Gallery of Ballarat staff have begun working on an extensive project which will eventually see them digitise the entire collection.

Gallery director Louise Tegart said the current phase of the project involved the digitisation of the ceramic pieces, which is only a portion of the institution’s holdings.

“The ceramics collection including around 850 pieces is just a small part of our collection, which contains more than 11,000 items, including a large holding of works on paper,” she said.

“All of these had be retrieved from storage, unpacked, their condition recorded, photographed, and catalogue records undated before they were repacked in appropriate archival boxes.

“Then there is a lot of data collection work to be done after the photography and then we need to get all the copyright permissions as well once we’re done all our work so the entire project is going to take quite a bit of time.”

Selecting to capture the ceramic collection first, Ms Tegart said was a way for the Gallery to celebrate Ballarat’s new crown as the UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Art.

“It’s important for us to highlight that we have this amazing ceramics collection, it’s also been a great opportunity to see what

we’ve got and where the holes are in the collection,” she said.

“Now we know what we’ve got and what the condition of everything is, we can start putting it out on display and looking to acquire other pieces.

“I think next up we will focus on doing the works on paper collection, there are big digitisation machines that we could hire to do that.”

Since the start project officer Kiri Smart and photographer Jon Paley have been tirelessly working to get the job completed.

“It’s been a great opportunity, it’s great that the gallery decided to use in house staff because for us it has been a huge help over the COVID period,” Ms Smart said.

Mr Paley added, “It’s a real privilege to be a part of that to be able to look at those pieces and it’s not every day you get to be a part of a legacy project like this one, this isn’t going to get done again ever.”

This current phase of the gallery’s digitisation project was made possible thanks to a grant from Creative Victoria as part of the Government’s regional digitisation roadshow which aims to increase the state’s public collections available on the database.

“We’ve been fortunate that we have got government funding, so we will have to go and seek additional funding to fund the ongoing project,” Ms Tegart said.

“It’s a huge project but if COVID has showed up anything it’s the importance of making collections accessible.”