Web sites for professionals

Most of the web is a black hole.  This has persuaded many
professionals to keep it at arms length, using it for temporary
messages on list-serves and to access source material posted by
research institutes, labs, and major universities, but shunning the
web as an avenue for their own professional publication.  This is
rapidly changing as scholars and other professionals recognize that
print publication and web publication each have distinctive
advantages.  Most of us recognize the advantage of the web in making
material available quickly and to a large, diverse international
audience.  But the web also has certain advantages for professional
disciplines.

When reading articles in professional journals, we must often accept
the conclusions on faith or, more likely, suspend judgment, because
the evidence on which the conclusions are based is too extensive and
costly for print publication.  On the web, appendixes of this data,
both text and images, can be made available easily and
inexpensively.  Think of having Studies in Conservation, the Journal
of the AIC, and other professional journals available on the web
with full documentation, both data and images.  Some professional
societies are already publishing separate, scholarly material on
their web sites.

I have recently posted a web site that attempts to take advantage of
a few of the web's advantages and I hope may encourage other
professionals to use the web as an avenue for making some of their
own research available.  I am think especially of areas of our
research that is not destined for print publication, but which would
be valuable for other professional and for faculty and students.

The web site I have recently posted does not deal with conservation
and so I hesitate to mention it on this list.  But I hope it
provides an example for one type of web site that would be of value
in many disciplines, certainly in conservation and historic
restoration.  It is a web sites on which images provide the central
content and where they are of sufficient number and quality to serve
as evidence, not just as illustration. There are captions and text
but the site is considered a supplement to text already available in
books, where 600 photos are simply too expensive to publish. The web
site was created with professionals, faculty and students in mind
and requires an efficient internet connection, such as those
generally available at colleges and universities.

The site is available at
<URL:http://www.reed.edu/gettyarchitecture>.

Every photograph is dated (not likely to find its way past many
editors but surely desirable for all photographs intended as
evidence, whatever the field), and the site includes the only
annotated bibliography on its subject, rare in print publication in
spite of the obvious value. Without annotations, bibliographies are
simply lists.

I look forward to seeing some of you in Melbourne this October.

Charles S. Rhyne
Professor Emeritus, Art History
Reed College
3203 S.E. Woodstock Blvd.
Portland, OR  97202-8199
503-771-1112  x7469
Fax: 503-788-6691


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 14:9
                   Distributed: Friday, July 28, 2000
                        Message Id: cdl-14-9-008
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