John Ruskin's Teaching Collections

This two-year project presented via the Web, a fully searchable and browsable catalogue linked to digitized images of John Ruskin's 'Teaching Collections' held in the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. The interface presents users with a means of linking Ruskin's original catalogues of his collection with modern catalogue information, presenting the entire Oxford-based collection as a single resource: as some of the original collections have now been dispersed under individual artist categories, the project virtually reassembled them in Ruskin's original sequences. At the same time the project assisted in the preservation and cataloguing of the material. The project increased access to these priceless objects which otherwise can only be seen by visiting Oxford. In addition, echoing Ruskin's support for contemporary art, two modern artistic responses to the collection were commissioned and added to the project site. In 2010, the project was awarded additional funding from the AHRC to ensure its sustainability by bringing its data into the with Ashmolean's core collections management and web delivery systems, as well as increasing its dissemination by commissioning additional framing content and contemporary artistic responses.