Abstract
In the context of digital humanities and access to cultural heritage online, this paper explores the discoverability of Late Antique material in some searchable museum collections and in some major archaeological and art historical image and object databases. It follows an exploratory approach by using simple keyword searches, such as ‘late antique’ or ‘byzantine’, and comparing the results with chronological searches when a date or period filter is available. Although Late Antique material often comprises a smaller number of objects compared to more popular periods like the Roman and the Renaissance, these are difficult to research due to inconsistent labelling practices and the frequent lack of a customizable date range filter. The ongoing debates on proper periodization and nomenclature also need to be taken into consideration.
Highlights
The closure of libraries, archives and museums, or the highly restricted access to these, as well as the virtual impossibility to travel during the Covid pandemic of 2020–2021, has demonstrated the immense value of online resources for accessing various kinds of material
Even if an increasing number of major institutions make a wide variety of objects from all time periods and geographic regions accessible online, I would argue that material of interest in less prominent fields, such as Late Antique and Byzantine art, might still be hard to research
Even considering that using simple keywords could lead to finding irrelevant results as well, since these can occur in the metadata for an object from different cultures or time periods, as discussed in Section 3.2, a difference of over 10,000 results based on search strategy alone should be an indication of inconsistent metadata practices
Summary
The closure of libraries, archives and museums, or the highly restricted access to these, as well as the virtual impossibility to travel during the Covid pandemic of 2020–2021, has demonstrated the immense value of online resources for accessing various kinds of material. For students and scholars in the fields of archaeology and art history these would be, for example, fieldwork documentation, primary and secondary literature, archival material or, as is the topic of this paper, online museum catalogues and image and object databases. This paper discusses the discoverability of Late Antique and early Byzantine objects in some major online collections from the user’s perspective and demonstrates some frequently occurring challenges. The latter are often omitted from publications on specific image and object databases since these are frequently authored by people directly involved in the development of such databases, as publications on the archaeological Arachne and the art historical Prometheus indicate [1,2,3,4,5]
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