INT RODUCING A RKYVES

O U R F A S C I N A T I O N

At Arkyves we are fascinated by images, whether they are medieval miniatures or modern pho-
tographs, Renaissance paintings, satirical prints or even the mental images evoked by texts. We
are fascinated by the way images are created, by how they may be transformed and adapted to
new contexts, how they work, and how researchers establish their meaning.
And we assume you are fascinated too. That is why Arkyves is more than just another image-
bank. That is why in Arkyves you will not find just collections of images, but also descriptive
metadata interpreting those images, and scholarly literature about the theory and practice of inter-
preting images.

SUBJECT ACCESS IS THE KEY

Anyone who has a serious interest in imagery, whether as a researcher of history, anthropol-
ogy, sociology, or design, or as a creator of new imagery, stresses the importance of subject
access. We could not agree more. That is why, at Arkyves, we spend considerable time creating
metadata describing the content of images. It is also why we use the controlled vocabulary of the
Iconclass system for the classification of cultural content.

A C OR PUS WITH A PLAN

Millions and millions of pictures and texts have been created over time, and never before in
such quantity as today. In the face of such abundance, completeness is a meaningless concept.
Growth is important, however, and it is accomplished by sensibly connecting the Arkyves core
collections to collections indexed by partner institutions that also value subject access. Thus we
can ensure that the growth of the corpus does not threaten the quality of the retrieval.
S U B S C R I B I N G T O A R K Y V E S

With a subscription to Arkyves you will get access to a steadily growing number of interesting
image collections, methodically indexed by subject, and to a bibliography of iconographic
literature, similarly indexed by subject.

But there is more. When you subscribe to Arkyves you may set aside the pictures and texts that
you find there, on a personal page. Whether the images are relevant to your research or teach-
ing, or simply inspire you and stimulate your imagination, you may store pictures, text, biblio-
graphical references, etcetera, for later use, for sharing with colleagues or students or for online
publications. You may add comments and annotations, thus further enriching the original meta-
data, and you may incorporate rich sources in web articles.

A R K Y V E S P A R T N E R S

If you have an image collection with descriptive metadata, you can become an Arkvyes partner
and have us connect your collection to those of other institutions and researchers.
To its partners the Iconclass Foundation supplies an OAI-compliant Iconclass harvesting ser-
vice that solves their Iconclass retrieval issues. Partners may even make use of the technical
infrastructure of Arkyves to put their own collections online.

W H A T I S I N T H I S B R O C H U R E ?

In this brochure you will find a brief explanation of our approach to subject access, followed by a
description of our growth strategy. After that we shall explain the basic partnership structure and
we shall conclude by summarizing the terms and conditions of a subscription.
I M A G E A N D M E A N I N G

Over a period of many centuries and across many countries, a deceived husband would be
described as ‘wearing horns’, or as being ‘fitted with horns’. We find the expression in German:
Einem Hörner aufsetzen; in Italian: cornuto; in French: cornard; and in Dutch: hoorndrager,
to give just a few examples. The image of a horned husband is used in many stories and pictures.
All of those stories and pictures give their own twist to the imagery, depending on the time
and place of their creation, and the specific goal of their creator. The older husband, deceived by
his wife with a younger man, and the husband who, upon his return from years of war, sees that
his wife has given birth to one or more children: these are typical examples of men called
cornutus.

Since the imagery of the horned husband informs us about a society’s views on adultery, it is
of interest to researchers from many different disciplines. It will supply material for the research
of anthropologists, sociologists and many kinds of historians. To turn documents like paint-
ings, prints, and drawings into truly useful sources for the study of a theme like this, sophis-
ticated metadata are necessary. More specifically, metadata are needed that describe both their
form and their meaning. Evidently, the meaning of an image or a text is by definition subject
to debate, since it is never a fixed and immanent property of the image itself. Meaning is
constructed by viewers and readers with the help of what they see, what they know and what
they think. Since what people know and think changes all the time, the meaning of a source is
by inherently subject to scholarly debate. In Arkyves you can contribute to that debate by
annotating and commenting on existing descriptions and by adding your own metadata.
S UBJECT ACCESS

Subject access to Arkyves’ documents, whether they are illustrated books, prints, paintings,
proverbs, or texts, is controlled by the use of the multilingual Iconclass system for the classifica-
tion of cultural content. By using
Iconclass, the broader terms of any
descriptor to the image are automati-
cally assigned to an image, and can
therefore be used for retrieval. The image of a younger man putting horns on the head of the
elderly husband, will therefore be found in the database even if you search with an abstract
term like ‘marriage’.
Likewise, the hierarchical construction of Iconclass will cause you to find
the cornuto gesture with which the young wife mocks her elderly husband
behind his back, even if you use a broader term like gesture. Since the Icon-
class system exists in a num-
ber of different languages,
you can also use Italian, French or German for
searching, as exempli-
fied by this translation.
The screenshot also shows the alphanumerical encoding of the con-
cepts, which makes the organization of the terminology explicit. The
display of codes, incidentally, can be switched on or off . The encoding of
the concepts makes it very easy to pull more instances of the same theme
from the database. It would be easy to compare the situation of the con-
fused crusader who returns to his slightly nervous wife and to children that are not his, with
other images in Arkyves. In practice it would suffice to click the line that starts with “Search us-
ing...” to retrieve all instances of the concept encoded ‘42B36’.
G R O W T H A N D P A R T N E R S H I P

Items in Arkyves that illustrate the theme of the ‘illegitimate child’ theme span more than six
centuries and originate in different corners of Europe. So, in a trice you will have enough material
at your disposal to serve as the basis for further research. Obviously, this material will not be
complete in any sense of the word. However, until many more museums and libraries will have
published their image collections on the internet, completeness is just an empty word. There is no
way to compare the contents of Arkyves or any other database with a heritage the size of which no
one knows. There simply is no way to estimate the size of unknown territory ...

Not knowing the size of the territory need not stop us from systematically mapping what we
have discovered so far. And that is precisely our ambition at Arkyves: to gradually expand our
collection with sources of which the subject matter has been carefully charted.
Expansion happens in two ways. First of all the Arkyves editors themselves select and catalogue
new source material. Secondly, we incorporate material that has been catalogued by partner in-
stitutions or researchers. Whether we are dealing with paintings, illustrated books, stained glass,
medieval or modern material, ‘major’ or ‘minor’ art, or even historical texts, is not the issue. Our
criterion for including a collection is that it has been made searchable by subject, preferably with
the help of Iconclass. In other words: we want the contents of Arkyves to be as rich and heterogene-
ous as possible, but its method of access to be as homogeneous as possible.

A partnership will mean that the special Iconclass Retrieval Browser is put at the disposal of the
partner institution, free of charge. It has been our experience that many museums, libraries, ar-
chives, and special projects using Iconclass are in need of software that caters for the easy re-
trieval through keywords of images that have been classified with codes from the Iconclass sys-
tem.
Since the development of such highly specialized software requires a more than substantial in-
vestment, it seems practical not to force Iconclass users to reinvent the wheel, but to make
available what has already been created and what can be integrated into almost any website
without much programming effort. We shall gladly explain the technical ins and outs of this ar-
rangement to you, but not here. Here we shall limit ourselves to the bare essentials. These can
be inspected in the screenshot on the following page, which shows fragments of the website on
which Glasgow University has published French emblem books. The content of those books
has been classified with the help of Iconclass. The Iconclass Retrieval Browser is supplied
by the Iconclass Foundation and kept on its servers, but is seamlessly integrated in the web-
site of the project.

We need not concern ourselves now with the underlying technical pixie dust. Suffice it to know that
an institution using Iconclass codes for its subject access does not have to create its own solution for
thematic searching. That problem has been solved by the Iconclass Foundation.
The only thing we ask in return for this sophisticated software service is that institutions entering
a partnership allow us the use of part of the metadata with which they have described their
documents and of a copy of images they already make available in their own web catalogue. No
transfer of copyrights, no charges, no conditions preventing them to do exactly what they want
with their own material, and least of all an embargo. All we strive for is to create a single access
point for as much material as possible indexed with the Iconclass system that was originally
created by Henri van de Waal.
SUBSCRIPTION TYPE 1: CAMPUS LICENCE
A campus licence is intended for larger institutions, like universities, libraries, museums, and
documentation institutes. Within the institution's IP-range, users will have unrestricted access
to the Arkyves database. With a campus licence 25 additional personal logins are included.
With their institutional email address and an Arkyves password researchers can set up, access
and maintain a personal page with selected items from Arkyves. The cost of a campus licence
is 1000 € per year. Before you decide to subscribe you may try out Arkyves without restric-
tions for a period of six months. If you decide not to subscribe to Arkyves you will only pay
150 € for setup and administration costs.

SUBSCRIPTION TYPE 2: INDIVIDUAL SUBSCRIPTION

An individual subscription is intended for scholars or students of institutions that do not have
a campus licence, and more generally, for anyone interested in the collections of Arkyves. An
individual subscription comes with a personal login that you can use from any internet access
point. The cost of an individual login is 25 € per month. A one-year subscription costs 200 €.
Individual subscribers can get a refund of their fee if the institution that employs them decides
to purchase a campus licence. This holds for one subscriber per institution.

SUBSCRIPTION TYPE 3: ONE DAY PASS

If you only have a limited number of questions for Arkyves, you can also get a pass to search
the site for a 24 hour period at 10 €.

DISCOUNT FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Institutions or researchers who want to publish a collection in Arkyves, please contact us. We
can integrate your collection and/or set up a separate website in the Arkyves space for free(!).
You will also qualify for a discount on your subscription to the whole of Arkyves.