About SPARC Digital
SPARC Digital is a platform created by FIT Library's Special Collections and FIT Archive to showcase the rare and unique materials from our collections that have been digitized. While only a small percentage of our collections have been digitized, we will be consistently adding to this platform with the goal of making our collections more widely available online to the FIT community and the general public; feel free to browse what is here and check back for additional content. For more information about the Special Collections and FIT Archive generally, or to make an appointment to view digital content in person, please visit SPARC's homepage.
The Collections
SPARC Digital features material from dozens of collections in the form of original fashion sketches, photographs, illustrations, historic fashion plates, oral histories, video recordings and full-text monographs. These collections contain many fine examples of women's wear, menswear, children's wear, millinery, footwear, jewelry, and costume created between the 18th and 20th century. Begin exploring on our Collections page.
Rights and Permissions
The Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC) of the FIT Gladys Marcus Library does not own copyrights for all material held in its physical custody. It is the researcher's obligation to satisfy copyright law when copying or using materials (including digital materials) found in or made available from the unit. If you would like more information about reusing material, please contact us.
Where possible, SPARC has reviewed material in SPARC Digital and included a rights statement in the metadata associated with each item. This rights statement indicates whether a researcher may or may not reuse an item and the permission needed to do so.
In the case where items have been identified as being in the public domain, SPARC has determined that there is no known copyright restricting its use in the United States. Researchers do not need SPARC's permission to reuse these items. However, these works may be subject to other restrictions due to rights of privacy, or publicity, and they may also be subject to laws when used outside of the United States. Again, it is the researcher's responsibility to determine and satisfy all copyright laws when copying or using the materials. Works generally enter into the public domain in the United States if they were originally published before 1923, or, in the case of unpublished works, after the creator has been deceased for 70 years. If you would like more information on public domain determination in the United States, please consult this chart provided by the Copyright Information Center at Cornell University.
If you feel any material on SPARC Digital violates copyright law, then please notify us immediately. Our intention is purely educational, but we will promptly remove any material determined to be in violation.
Color Search
One of the features we were most excited to implement with SPARC Digital is the ability to search and browse the collection by color. Users will find this feature especially conducive for exploring a collection centered on fashion.
There are several ways to use this feature. First, when you open an image on SPARC Digital, you will see up to five swatches of color under the ‘Color Palette’ section of the metadata. If you click on any of these swatches, you will bring up all of the images in our collection that also contain this color. Second, when you browse the collection by clicking on Items in the site menu and then select ‘Filter’, you will see options to filter by ‘Color’ and ‘Predominant Color’. ‘Color’ works as previously described. ‘Predominant Color’ will show a list of colors representing basic color families. If you select any of these colors, you will bring up all the images that belong to that general color family. Color filtering can also be applied to search results. Try searching our site by shoes and then filtering by ‘Predominant Color’. If you select the color family yellow, you will receive results for several images of yellow shoes.
How Color Search Works
To implement color search, we used a bit of code to analyze each image in our collection and identify its predominant colors in hexadecimal color notation. The colors identified in this analysis are then matched up with two separate palettes to make them functional for our users. That is, because the potential number of colors is quite large—there are over 16 million colors expressable through hexadecimal notation—we need to make the colors less specific so that there is a greater likelihood that they will match colors found in other images. For instance, if one image has one shade of red (#e81603) in it and another has a slightly different shade of red (#eb1203) in it, we can match both of those shades to a common red (#ff0000) that is found in the color palette.
The first palette, used for more specific matches, is made up of 139 colors defined in the CSS4 Color Module; the second palette, used for color family, is made up of 16 general CSS4 colors. Because of the nature of color and our methodology, users may sometimes encounter matches that seem off. Another limitation users may encounter is that our color analysis occurs on the entire image, not just the object in the image. Because many of our images are sketches, the color of the paper itself is sometimes identified as a predominant color even though that is less useful to users. On the whole, though, these limitations are far outweighed by the benefits of this feature.
Our work here has followed the lead of many of our colleagues, specifically the innovative uses of color in the digital collections at the Cooper Hewitt and Google Arts and Culture. The code we used for this project was developed largely by using code written by the Cooper Hewitt for their digital collections and detailed on the Cooper Hewitt Labs blog. If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions about our work, please feel free to contact us.