The Savannah College of Art and Design Digital Collections.
SCAD Libraries is proud to announce the Savannah College of Art and Design Digital Collections! For the last year we have been working on a project to provide images and content for a variety of library materials. We now have content in three modules, with exciting ideas to expand in the future. Our next planned module will utilize our amazing Artists’ Book collection from the ACA Library at SCAD Atlanta.
The first module is the Graduate Theses Collection which contains thesis work completed at all SCAD locations from fall 2010 forward and includes both written and visual components. This project will not only provide the public a sense of the richness of graduate work done at SCAD, but will also present timely models of what a graduate thesis should address for MFA candidates. The collection is organized by thesis title.
The Special Collections Department has provided content for the two other modules in the Digital Collections. The first is the Don Bluth Collection of Animation. This collection came to the Savannah College of Art and Design as a donation from Don Bluth and Gary Goldman in fall of 2005. The collection consists of cels, animation drawings, storyboards, color models, and other materials created by Don Bluth Productions and later incarnations of this company in the creation of animated features and video games between 1979 and 2004.
Color key from The Little Blue Whale
Though the processing of the collection will continue for many years, materials already processed are available to researchers now. Presented in the Digital Collections are selections from various animated features, concepts, and video games in the collection. The materials are divided by feature titles. Our future plans include adding more animated clips from animation drawings. We hope to include great examples of both character and effects animation in the future.
The second Special Collections module is the Images of Savannah. Savannah is a city rich in history and beautiful architecture. Photographers have been capturing views of the city for the tourist trade and for commercial purposes since the beginning of photography. The Savannah College of Art and Design collects images of the city and environs in various forms such as stereographs, postcards, slides, and other formats. Images from several collections are presented here, providing a cross-section of time.
Savannah's Riverfront, Stereograph by D. J. Ryan, circa 1870.
The stereographs date from the 1870s, postcards from the 1900s, and photographs and slides are more recent. The images have been divided into categories, such as Aerial Views, Churches, Downtown Buildings, Hotels, and Schools, for ease of discovery. Our future plans include adding images from some of our photography collections. This will provide researchers important insights into how Savannah has changed over time.
To find the collections, you could follow the links in the blog post, but it is probably easier to remember to go the Libraries’ website to follow the links. Open the library catalog’s web interface. Underneath the SCAD Library logo in the top left corner you will find tabs. Select the second tab, Databases. When you click on it, you will see some linked options. Select Databases by Title, the first option. You will get an alphabetical title list of our databases. The three modules can be found in this list. Once you get into the Digital Collections Database, you can navigate in a couple of ways. You can use browse the titles in each collection. The contents of each collection are displayed in an alphabetical list with a thumbnail. To view an item, just click on it. If you want to see a larger image, just click on the image on the record page. You can also use the search box at the top of the page to search across one collection or all collections. We hope you will have as much fun using this collection as we had creating it!