CAMEO

CAMEO goes Wiki

With generous support provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and
through the combined efforts of many people at the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, CAMEO has been migrated off its former proprietary
software system and placed on an open MediaWiki platform. This major
step now allows scientists, conservators, and curators from around
the world to contribute to the CAMEO pages. (Those interested in
becoming an editor may contact Michele Derrick at mderrick<-at->mfa<.>org

CAMEO (Conservation and Art Materials Encyclopedia Online;
<URL:http://cameo.mfa.org> is a free online resource developed by
the MFA that contains information on more than 10,000 materials used
in the production and conservation of artistic, architectural,
archaeological, and anthropological materials. The information is
illustrated using examples from the MFA's vast collection of art
(for example

    <URL:http://cameo.mfa.org/wiki/Azurite>

Since its inception in November 2000, CAMEO has garnered worldwide
interest as a source of technical information on art and
conservation materials. For example in the past month, the new CAMEO
was accessed in more than 100 countries. This international
accessibility has been sparked by the multilingual contributions
made to the database by the CAMEO working group in CHARISMA
<URL:http://www.charismaproject.eu/>

This wiki-based transformation of CAMEO also includes the addition
of two new resources related to the use and analysis of natural and
synthetic dyes in works of art. The first comes from documentation
of the Uemura Rokuro collection of dyed fabrics that was acquired by
the MFA in 2008. It comprises the original Japanese text with its
English translation, as well as images of the dyed samples. The
second new resource is seminal to the scientific art analysis world
because it provides critical analytical parameters for the analysis
of synthetic and natural dyes using state-of-the-art liquid
chromatographic and mass spectrometric equipment. This database will
contain the results from a joint project, funded by the National
Science Foundation, between the MFA's Scientific Research Lab,
Simmons College, and Boston University. Integral to this data is the
analysis of all the samples in the Uemura collection.

Michele Derrick
Schorr Family Associate Research Scientist
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 27:11
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