The Costume Collection Electronic Archive

Kathryn Rohe, Drama

1996 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~kmr3c/docs/frameset.html

The University's Drama Department holds a collection of over one thousand antique clothing pieces dating back as early as 1840. This extraordinary collection, largely undocumented and unpublished, is the focus of Kathryn Rohe's TTI project, which will involve undergraduate students in the conservation, research, documentation, and World Wide Web publication of the collection's distinctive holdings. In her fall undergraduate class, the History of Dress, Professor Rohe and her students will select the first 100 appropriate garments from the collection. After prepping the garments (repairing and mounting on a dress mannequin), the students will photograph them and then digitize the reproductions. Researching the garments, adding essential information to a web-based database of the collection's holdings, and then designing a Web site to which they can publish the results of their research, are activities in which each student will participate. Professor Rohe's TTI course will allow students to be technological pioneers in the field of costume history. Students will be taught principles of image digitization, database entry, and web design, as well as the skills traditional to the discipline. Special garments will be chosen to be displayed using QTVR technology - which allows virtual rotation of three-dimensional objects - allowing students to develop highly advanced digital imaging skills. The long-term goal for this project is to document and publish the entire Costume Collection and develop an extensive amount of supplemental data, valuable to scholars of costume design and history everywhere. This project then will provide years of significant lab work, and will result in a very impressive body of information developed almost exclusively by students.