heritage Article Trace the Untraceable: Online Image Search Tools for Researching Late Antique Art Prolet Decheva   Citation: Decheva, P. Trace the Untraceable: Online Image Search Tools for Researching Late Antique Art. Heritage 2021, 4, 4076–4104. https://doi.org/10.3390/ heritage4040225 Academic Editors: Alessandro Sebastiani and Robin Skeates Received: 29 August 2021 Accepted: 28 October 2021 Published: 31 October 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin, D04 V1W8 Dublin, Ireland; prolet.decheva@ucdconnect.ie Abstract: In the context of digital humanities and access to cultural heritage online, this paper explores the discoverability of Late Antique material in some searchable museum collections and in some major archaeological and art historical image and object databases. It follows an exploratory approach by using simple keyword searches, such as ‘late antique’ or ‘byzantine’, and comparing the results with chronological searches when a date or period filter is available. Although Late Antique material often comprises a smaller number of objects compared to more popular periods like the Roman and the Renaissance, these are difficult to research due to inconsistent labelling practices and the frequent lack of a customizable date range filter. The ongoing debates on proper periodization and nomenclature also need to be taken into consideration. Keywords: late antique art; byzantine art; online museum collections; image libraries 1. Introduction The closure of libraries, archives and museums, or the highly restricted access to these, as well as the virtual impossibility to travel during the Covid pandemic of 2020–2021, has demonstrated the immense value of online resources for accessing various kinds of material. For students and scholars in the fields of archaeology and art history these would be, for example, fieldwork documentation, primary and secondary literature, archival material or, as is the topic of this paper, online museum catalogues and image and object databases. Even if an increasing number of major institutions make a wide variety of objects from all time periods and geographic regions accessible online, I would argue that material of interest in less prominent fields, such as Late Antique and Byzantine art, might still be hard to research. While, compared to artifacts from more popular periods, these often represent a smaller fraction of the institutionally published objects and images, it can be difficult to explore the former in an efficient manner due to the lack of proper filtering options and/or to inconsistent metadata practices. This paper discusses the discoverability of Late Antique and early Byzantine objects in some major online collections from the user’s perspective and demonstrates some frequently occurring challenges. The latter are often omitted from publications on specific image and object databases since these are frequently authored by people directly involved in the development of such databases, as publications on the archaeological Arachne and the art historical Prometheus indicate [1–5]. 1.1. Literature Review While publications interested in user behavior such as by Dobreva et al. [6], Ross and Terras [7], Ross et al. [8], Villaespesa [9] or Pandey and Cumar [10] concern individual collections [7–9] or countries [10] and provide quantitative data, studies such as those by Beaudoin and Brady [11] and Münster et al. [12] look to make more nuanced analyses. Both articles provide a good overview of previous studies of scholarly image search behaviour. The study by Münster et al. combines qualitative interviews with twenty art historians and fifteen students of art and architectural history with an analysis of 107 online image Heritage 2021, 4, 4076–4104. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage4040225 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/heritage