oa Re-Imagining Through Re-Imaging. RTI Helping Us See Museum Collections in a New Light

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During the pandemic, museum visitors became increasingly reliant on the internet for acquiring information about collections they could not visit in person. In 2020, curatorial and imaging staff at the Art Institute of Chicago launched a project to investigate how Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) can be used to present ancient inscribed works to new virtual audiences. Digitally exhibiting ancient Greek and Roman coins from the collection that are unsuitable for physical display due to their worn conditions is a primary goal of this project. This paper further explores the benefits to virtually manipulating a light source to reveal different subtleties of detail over the limitations of examining a standard 2D image. The project hopes to make a case for our web developers to build an interactive RTI viewer to use on the museum collections website, which is increasingly becoming the primary platform for publishing academic content of our collections.