This project has changed since my proposal blog post a few months back, but that’s a good thing. My scope now is now focused and I am determined to provide a useful database for Art on Call locations in Washington, D.C. It’s is frustrating that such a wonderful project doesn’t have a public database to begin with.
I’ve reached out to Cultural Tourism DC to see if they have a list of call boxes for their own record, as I would like to make this data base as complete as possible. For now I haven’t heard anything, but I will keep everyone updated in the comments if that changes.
I created a google drive folder that is open to the public, that people can see here. It contains an excel sheet, folder of all of the pictures, and the google my maps that someone created that contains about half of the Art on Call boxes.
Below you can see some of the picture’s I have taken so far. Since the goal is to make this as accessible as possible I carefully labeled each of the Art on Call pictures in the following format: [Name|Front or Back|.jpeg. So example, the Washington Ballet Art On Call callbox has two pictures, one titled WashingtonBalletFront.jpeg and WashingtonBalletBack.jpeg. This way someone who was just browsing my drive folder could understand the organizational method I used.
The excel spreadsheet is something I hope to be able to give to the DC Public Library, so that they can have a complete data base for their collections. It includes the locations of the callboxes, the title of the call box, and hopefully will soon have an image of the front and back of each call box as well. However, I cannot figure out for the life of me how to insert a picture in the cell, even after two youtube tutorials. So if anyone has any suggestions – please let me know!
Once this drive in complete (or as complete as I can create it) I would like to be able to upload all of these images in WikiCommons. This way it available for the public under open licensing, and the images can be used in any way people want. As someone who has dealt a lot with photograph licensing this past few months, I can tell you nothing is more frustrating when you are working on something and want to use imagery , even for just non-commercial use, and you can’t find the rights or are denied non-commercial use.
WikiCommons will allow these images to live other lives in other people’s work, which is something I’m excited about.
Great to see this project taking shape. It’s clear that you’ve put in a lot of time gathering together a set of resources that has the potential to be really useful to a range of people.
I think it is a great idea to upload all of these up to Wikimedia Commons. That would then allow folks to both use and reuse the images but it would also enable future users to add more context and information about each of the works too. Once they are up there, I imagine you could also consider making your spreadsheet into a Wikipedia page about Art on Call. If you did that, you could build a table there that would include all of the images.
If you want help identifying folks at DCPL to reach out to about handing this off once you’ve finished it I’m happy to help. My sense is that this is going to be a neat piece of historical documentation of these works that would be of potential interest to them.