As a complement to the narrative and visual information presented through the Chicago Art Galleries Project (CAGP) website, supplementary resources were created to provide researchers with additional content and context.
One of these resources is a detailed Collection Assessment analyzing the six gallery collections housed in the Museum and School collections: ARC Gallery, Artemisia Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Donald Young Gallery, Randolph Street Gallery and Threewalls. This Collection Assessment considered the content and condition of materials in both quantitative and qualitative ways, and was undertaken in order to understand the resources necessary for future processing and digitization of the collections, and as a way of providing improved interim public access to these unprocessed and partially processed collections.
Assessments were performed at one of three levels: Container, Folder, or Item (in descending level of detail). At minimum, a container-level assessment was conducted for every box, flatfile drawer or other container type for all of the surveyed collections. Additionally, specific formats, such as photographs and audio/visual materials, were targeted for additional item-level assessment. Finally, a previously-created folder-level inventory of the Randolph Street Gallery collection was imported into the newly created dataset. There are a total of 628 container assessment records, 1,697 item records, and 8,614 legacy folder-level records; or 10,940 records in all.
The content analysis portion of the assessment created basic descriptive data points (e.g., title, dates, names, subjects); estimated the degree of original order; identified core documentation (founding documents, mission statements, personnel lists, exhibit lists, etc.), as well as where personally identifiable information or other sensitive materials may exist; established thematic categories (series and subseries) to inform future cataloging efforts; and made estimations of relative research value. The preservation analysis portion of the assessment assigned formats in two hierarchical groupings; identified potential hazards and general conservation needs; and quantified extent.
The low-code, cloud-based platform Airtable was selected for the collection and dissemination of this dataset, having been used extensively for previous complex collection processing and project planning needs. Note that some assessment data has been suppressed from the publicly-available data set.
View the dataset here. (Note: Dataset is large and may take time to load)
View the data key here for more information on the data fields found in the dataset.