Huntington Archive to become charter collection in Mellon Foundation database

Archive images: By John C. Huntington, courtesy of The Huntington Archive The female Buddha Green Tara grants the absence of fear in a wall painting in the Tsumtsek building of Alchi Monastery, Ladak, Northern India.

Grant funds digitization of 10,000 Asian art images

Nearly 30 years ago, Susan and John Huntington began taking photographs of the Buddhist works of art they encountered while doing field work in remote locations in Asia. Their cameras have captured for posterity thousands of detailed images of ancient and modern art and architecture, building a collection of Asian photographs unrivaled in the world.

The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art, housed in Hayes Hall at Ohio State, is home to an estimated 300,000 photographs and slides. The archive continues to grow and evolve, with efforts to digitize the collection now serving as the top priority.

To that end, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the archive a one-year grant of $321,000 to digitize 10,000 photographs of Asian art. The images from the Huntington Archive will be one of the charter collections included in the Mellon Foundation's recently launched ArtSTOR, a database of high-quality digital images and scholarly materials intended to assist researchers in the study of art, architecture and other fields in the humanities.

Art historians John and Susan Huntington have received more than $300,000 from the Mellon Foundation to digitize photographs in their archive of Asian art. Their work will join an international database intended to give scholars, teachers and students access to the images.     By Jo McCulty

"They can use us as an anchor to encourage other institutions to put their materials on ArtSTOR as well," said Susan Huntington, dean of the Graduate School, vice provost for graduate studies and Distinguished University Professor of history of art.

The Mellon Foundation, through ArtSTOR, is working with several major museums of art and educational institutions to generate support for the larger project, which has a goal of making accessible information that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to access.

"What they want is digital images of the highest quality online so teachers, scholars and students can have access to them," Susan Huntington said. "We'll be providing them with a broad representation of images from areas such as India, China, Japan and Tibet. In addition to including the most important works of art, there will also be quite a bit of depth from each region."

The majority of images digitized through Ohio State's grant will come from the Huntingtons' collection, but other sources will be used to round out the selections, when needed. The Huntingtons estimate that 75 percent to 85 percent of the materials are available within their collection.

There's a lot of work to be done, Susan Huntington said. "It translates to 50 images a day, with each image needing to be scanned, corrected and catalogued."

The grant provides for a number of new staff members -- scheduled to begin on Sept. 1 -- including a picture editor, scanner technician, image corrector, image controller and cataloguer. These positions are in addition to the archive's usual staff -- a curator, associate curator, five graduate associates and three work-study students.

Since it was formally established in 1986, with an Ohio Board of Regents Challenge Grant, the archive has been recognized with several prestigious external grants to assist in efforts to make the materials available for public use, including The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs (BETHA), the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH grant is providing funding for the digitization of 20,000 black-and-white photographs.

This metal sculpture from Tibet represents Vajrapani, a bodhisattva, or being of great compassion.     By John C. Huntington, courtesy of the Huntington Archive

"A lot of the archive materials were not available for students to study, so digitization has significantly expanded access for teaching and research," said Janice M. Glowski, curator of the archive and director of special collections/art archives for the College of the Arts. "The Mellon grant will enhance those efforts."

There was, and is, a real need for Asian art to be made available to researchers, said John Huntington, professor of history of art.

"One of the things we've found is if you study American or European art, you can write to a museum and ask for a photo of the object. It may cost you a lot, but you can do it," he said. "But, if you study Asian art, much of it is in situ. If you want to work on it, you either must go there and photograph it yourself, or rely on another researcher."

There is an urgency involved in documenting much of this art, as well. "It's not just about making the artwork accessible. In some cases, the photographs are the only record of an artwork," Susan Huntington said.

That point was illustrated in March, when Afghanistan leaders carried out the destruction of the largest standing Buddhas in the world, located in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan that had been a center of Buddhism between the fifth and ninth centuries.

"They considered it idolatry to have them, so they blew them up. They've destroyed part of the world's cultural heritage," John Huntington said. "It now survives only in the photographs we have and the photographs of other researchers."

The Taliban's actions generated widespread interest, prompting media from around the world, including CNN and NPR, to contact John Huntington as an expert. Media outlets regularly use the archives and the expertise of the Huntingtons as a resource for articles on Asian art.

Art speaks volumes about the culture that creates it, Susan Huntington said.

"It's a fossil record of society. The art works are physical documents of the cultures that produced them. By studying the art, we can gain an understanding of what these cultures were like," she said. "I can't interview a fifth century artist, but I can see what that artist made."

By Kevin Fitzsimons Ohio State researcher Lonnie Thompson, right, talks with CNN's Jeff Flock during Flock's July 18 visit to Ohio State to tape a segment about Thompson, named by the network and Time magazine as one of America's best scientists. Thompson, holding a drill bit, demonstrated the ice core drilling apparatus for CNN's cameras. The solar panels at right power the drill Thompson and his team use during research expeditions.

Time magazine, CNN name OSU geologist one of 'America's best'

An Ohio State geologist who earlier this year predicted that within 15 years, massive mountainous ice caps and glaciers around the world would melt because of global warming has been named one of America's best scientists by Time magazine and the Cable News Network.

Lonnie Thompson, a professor of geological sciences, was one of five U.S. scientists and physicians honored this month by the national television news media as being tops in their field. The television network announced the honor during the hour-long documentary "CNN Presents: America's Best" on Aug 12. Time featured Thompson in the Aug. 20 issue of the magazine.

Other researchers portrayed by CNN were Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Patricia Goldman-Rakic, professor of neurobiology at Yale University Medical School; Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and Andrew Knoll, a professor of biology at Harvard University. Time's coverage included these five, as well as 13 other researchers.

Thompson astonished global climate change experts in February when he reported that glaciers and ice caps in Africa and Peru that had stood solid for centuries are melting at an ever-increasing rate. He predicted the loss of these massive ice fields within the next 15 years because of an increase in global warming. Moreover, he warned that it may be too late to save the glaciers.

Thompson's report at the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that at least one-third of the massive ice field atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa has disappeared, or melted, in the last dozen years and more than four-fifths of the ice field has been lost since 1912, when it was first mapped. Also, Peru's Quelccaya ice cap in the southern mountains has shrunk by at least 20 percent since 1963.

"These glaciers are very much like the canaries once used in coal mines," Thompson said. "They're an indicator of massive changes taking place and a response to the changes in climate in the tropics."

Thompson, his wife and research partner Ellen Mosley-Thompson, a professor of geography at Ohio State, and colleagues at the University's Byrd Polar Research Center have spent the last quarter-century trekking to some of the most remote ice fields in the world, drilling through them to the bedrock, and bringing the ice cores back to Ohio State for analysis.

The Thompsons have argued for more than two decades that the first real indisputable signs of global warming will appear at these remote tropical ice caps.

"Seventy percent of the population of the planet live in the tropics between 30 degrees N and 30 degrees S," he explained. "Eighty percent of the new people added to the planet within the next century will live within that region, where only 20 percent of the world's agriculture occurs.

"Changes in this region will have a massive effect on humanity." Thompson has led more than 40 expeditions to sites on five continents to retrieve ice cores that measure hundreds of meters long, cores that contain thousands of years of records of past climate in the region. The oldest cores they have analyzed date back more than 700,000 years and contain records of numerous global ice ages. Earlier this year, he was named a fellow in the American Geophysical Union, an honor given to less than 1 percent of scientists in their field. He also was selected for a Distinguished Scholar award at Ohio State, the highest honor the University bestows on its working scientists.

"Lonnie Thompson exemplifies the best of Ohio State's researchers," explained Brad Moore, vice president for research. "The work he and his colleagues have accomplished has serious implications for every person on the planet. "His dedication to this research -- especially in the face of many colleagues' claims that such work could never be done -- and his personal courage in obtaining these climate records is an inspiration to scientists everywhere. "It is appropriate and wonderful that Time and CNN selected him as one of America's best scientists," Moore said.