Tom Sutcliffe: Hooked on the net's national treasures - By cheap brooches

I've written about the Public Catalogue Foundation before in these pages, a wholly admirable enterprise to identify and log every oil painting in public ownership in the country. It's a kind of Pevsner of fine art and its efforts have resulted in an accumulating library of volumes which, county by county, itemise every single painting and offer a matchbox-sized illustration of it. Browsing through these almost invariably turns up something interesting that you would never have expected to find, not to mention striking juxtapositions of the incompetent and the masterly. When I have written about the endeavour, though, it's often been with the faint sense that these handsome library volumes are the last gasp of cheap prom dresses a dying form of scholarship. That is, the information is of durable value but the form it arrives in is already beginning to look distinctly antique. cheap brooches
In fact, the enterprise was always destined to end up online – and yesterday saw the launch of the website that makes that possible. Your Paintings (www.bbc.co.uk/your paintings), created in partnership with the BBC, will eventually offer online access to all 200,000 art works on the Public Catalogue list, some 80 per cent of which aren't currently on public show. Far more significantly though it will make it possible to search that database by the content of the pictures – something that cheap bridal jewelry would be effectively impossible in book form, and without the participation of the public as volunteer indexers. wholesale cheap brooches
I tried out a beta version of the website's tagging software this week and very addictive it is too. Once you've signed up as a tagger, a painting is delivered at random and you're asked what "things or ideas" you can see in the painting. You can be stolidly literal and write things like "table" and "hat" and "flower". Or you can get a little more metaphorical and tag the painting with abstractions such as "expectation", say, or "motherhood". Provided enough other taggers agree with you the software will eventually add those terms to the artwork, and once enough taggers have looked at the painting it will be added to the Your Paintings website. Further stages allow you to identify people and places and, for some users, genres and painting styles. Ultimately – it's hoped within 18 months – it will be possible to type in a request for paintings that represent, say, motherhood in Southampton containing cameo brooches, and find out almost instantaneously whether any such thing exists in the public collection. Alternatively, you could look at every painting in the country that depicts Pendle Hill. cheap brooches and pins