The Hood Museum recently indexed about 30,000 of its art objects, including most of its fine art collection, on the Dartmouth College Information Service.
"All of the artwork is on, the whole Fine Arts collection," Questor Project Manager Deborah Haynes said.
Questor is the name of a computer program used at the Hood Museum.
Plans are in place to eventually have pictures of the artwork available on the network.
The works are separated into two different indexes on DCIS, Fine Arts and Anthropology/History, although a few pieces are in both.
Users can search the indexes by subject, artist, date, materials and nationality.
Professors can use to index to obtain lists of works by certain artists or of certain types for students in their classes to use, said Kathy Hart, the museum's curator of academic programming.
Then they can request certain works be pulled for their students to view.
"The DCIS probably will be more and more useful with classes that use the collections," Haynes said.
The next step for the museum is to scan in pictures of the artwork, but that project is awaiting funding.
"We're working on money to do that and we've done a little test file," Haynes said.
About 20 to 30 pieces have been scanned into the computer to use as demonstrations for obtaining funding from different sources, according to DCIS Project Director Robert Brentrup.
Brentrup said the major costs in the project are the scanning equipment, labor to photograph many of the works and computer storage space for the scanned pictures.
