Help UCL Art museum in national BBC campaign

UCL Art Museum has been chosen by the BBC to help spearhead their project to highlight the UK's collection of oil paintings and the stories behind them. Part of a joint online initiative between the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation, Your Paintings aims to make use of crowd-sourcing in order to get the public to help describe and categorise the thousands of painting contained within the collection. At the moment, the database only contains basic information for each of the 212,000 paintings. But by encouraging the public via crowd-sourcing to tag the paintings with additional information, it will enable Your Paintings to be searched by the public in a more sophisticated and helpful manner. With 755 paintings from UCL Art Museum included in the collection, it gives the public an opportunity to see, and document, many pictures that normally can't be displayed. The museum also hopes that this might help solve mysteries in its collection such as orphaned works or unknown sitters who remain to be identified. "Instead of being tucked away in stores, what this project allows is for works that are hard to display due to conservation and cost issues to be visible and accessible to the public," said Nina Pearlman, manager of the UCL Art Museum.