IMAG(N)ING SHUILU’AN: A MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVAL REPOSITORY

Harlan Wallach, Northwestern University

Imag(n)ing Shuilu’an is a project designed to deliver results across a broad range of goals, both practical and conceptual in addressing the development of a rich, complex multimedia archival repository. The American side of the collaborative project  was funded by the Andrew W Mellon foundation and Northwestern University. The Chinese side of the collaborative project was funded by the appropriate government agencies associated with the preservation of Cultural relics in China, at the local, regional and national level. The project produced a complete two-dimensional, high-resolution photographic record of the Shuilu’an temple while conducting experimental three-dimensional acquisition in a variety of formats, methods and procedures. It was designed to bring and disseminate the digital acquisition expertise, techniques and research efforts pioneered at Northwestern University to the Chinese partner institution, the Xi’an Center for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Relics A network mediated model was created for the development of descriptive metadata associated with the media content. Lastly it was designed to explore and evaluate the scholarly use of a unified network based interface. This interface enables the exploration of the different acquired data sets in context with the physical relationships of the original objects, and preserves those relationships as they reside in the temple. As such, this project in its entirety can be described as being use-neutral. Use-neutral meaning - Each aspect of the component phases of this project; acquisition, production, preservation and presentation, can be demonstrated to be useful across a broad range of disciplines. This paper will describe each of the developed data sets, and the tools developed to build the metadata and the prototype site to present the unified data set.