Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student, and Faculty Collaboration

Over the last two decades, teaching, learning and research in higher education have developed a growing digital presence. Digital development in the humanities has been slow relative to most other areas in academia, and with some exceptions art and art history have enjoyed slow digital growth within the humanities. Within this environment, the article here presents one collaborative model for digital art history, rare in its exclusive focus on undergraduate “junior scholars”. Undergraduate senior-level art history and studio art students at Providence College collaborate annually with art history and studio art faculty to publish their senior theses in print format as the Art Journal. In the last few years, students, faculty and digital library staff have enhanced this collaboration to include the publishing from process to product of the Art Journal as a complementary digital Art Journal. They collaborate in creating digital art history and digital studio art in order to bring exponentially greater meaning, significance and visibility to the students’ senior culminating works through real-world digital publishing, including quality control, copyright issues and ideas related to persistent access and ongoing global visibility for the scholarly and creative works and for the student scholars. These students function as real-world collaborative scholarly partners in publishing their culminating academic and artistic work globally and persistently accessible in Providence College’s digital repositories. This case study evidences engagement in meaningful digital knowledge creation focused on the intellectual and creative output of student-scholars and student-artists (art historians and studio artists) as a model for other student-faculty-digital library professional collaborations.