Yousef Jameel Online Centre for the Study of Islamic and Eastern Art

Project Description:

The Yousef Jameel Online Centre for the Study of Islamic and Eastern Art will be a global resource enabling students and scholars at every level, as well as the general public, to access and interact with the Ashmolean Museum's Islamic and Eastern Art collections online. The Yousef Jameel Online Centre for the Study of Islamic and Eastern Art will be launched in the winter 2009/10, following the opening of the new Ashmolean Museum in November 2009. The two key current areas of work are: Researching and documenting content and Virtual architecture and design. In order to provide an online resource which is useful and interesting to as wide a range of visitors as possible, the project team is improving the research and documentation for the collections to ensure that it is relevant and incorporates the most up-to-date research. This includes photographing the wide variety of objects that will feature in the new Ashmolean galleries. Objects which previously had dated or non-existent photographic records, or had only been photographed from one perspective, will now have very high quality images from different angles. The project team is looking at different ways of presenting information and images for the online collections element of the Centre as well as the technological possibilities and features that could enable this. An important area of this work is looking at who will be using the Centre and how they will use it, in order to ensure that a highly accessible and stimulating website is developed. The goal is to make the online centre user-friendly and easy to navigate, while still incorporating in-depth, searchable collections information.