The Hindu : National Gallery to turn its pictures into pixels

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 05, 2003

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National Gallery to turn its pictures into pixels

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore March 4. The Delhi-based National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) has joined hands with the global printer leader, Hewlett Packard, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) at Pune, in an ambitious project to digitise its collection running to over 17,000 works of art.

In a pilot project launched today, the gallery's collection of around 200 works by Amrita Sher-Gill and Rabindranath Tagore would be taken up for digital image capture. Once the nitty gritty of digitising, proofing, and cataloguing had been mastered, it was proposed to extend the technology to the rest of the collection, the Gallery's director, Rajeev Lochan, said in the course of a joint announcement here by the three participating agencies.

HP's senior vice-president for corporate affairs, Debra Dunn, said the company would donate the infrastructure required for the pilot project and draw on its expertise gained from similar tasks undertaken for leading international museums, including London's National Gallery and the Louvre at Paris.

S. Ramani, who heads HP Labs in India, explained that the image capture would be done using the well known Swiss camera, Sinar P3 with a digital `back'. The project envisaged archiving the full holdings of a gallery and providing art enthusiasts and scholars with high-quality coloured prints `on demand', rather than using the offset printing process.

R.K.Arora, executive director of C-DAC, said the Bangalore unit of the Centre would create the digital library of NGMA holdings and house the images on special servers. C-DAC was inspired to enter the arena of digital preservation of art after a visit to Thanjavur's Saraswathi Mahal library and seeing its rich heritage collection.

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