The Robert Frank Collection Online at the National Gallery of Art

The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank’s career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

Dartmouth Digital Orozco

José Clemente Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization mural cycle at Dartmouth College’s Baker-Berry Library is virtually represented in the Dartmouth Digital Orozco.

The Dartmouth Digital Orozco project allows users to pan and zoom through the 24 panels of the mural cycle as they exist in the library. If you click anywhere on the mural, a lightbox of related images will open. Dartmouth has a wealth of supplementary images including more than hundred preparatory drawings and historical photographs of the mural. You also overlay supplementary images on top of the mural to see how preparatory drawings relate by adjusting the transparency of the overlay.

The VRC has been building a collection of Mexican mural paintings, so if you’d like to explore our images, login to Luna and search for Mexican muralist.

Digitized Manuscripts from the Vatican Apostolic Library

 

The Vatican Apolostic Library has been working on a project to digitize more than 80,000 documents in its collection. Currently there are nearly 4,500 manuscripts online and there is hope that they’ll have 15,000 manuscripts available by 2018.

The collection features a variety of important and early manuscripts and books, including Pre-Columbian manuscripts, early Greek and Latin texts, Islamic manuscripts, and even some Japanese paintings.

You can browse some of the materials at DigitaVaticana here as well as on the website of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Images can be downloaded from the digital library, but they come with a watermark and copyright statement.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed by Lorenzi il Magnifico in the 15th century. Folio 101 recto with a section of the Inferno. Reg.lat.1896A.

New Zealand Museum Releases 30,000 Images

The Te Papa Museum of New Zeland has released more than 30,000 high resolution images for download and re-use! To find images that can be reused, the search box is equipped with a radio button to allow users to select “with downloadable images.”

The Te Papa museum collection contains “artworks, objects, and specimens,” from “dinosaur teeth to contemporary art,” and as such presents two advanced search options for object and specimen to allow users to query different metadata fields.

For more information about the Creative Commons license governing the re-use of Te Papa’s images, check out their recent blog post about the initiative. Click here to explore the collection!

Met Releases 400,000 Digital Images for Use

On May 16, the Metropolitan Museum announced a new initiative called the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and released more than 400,000 images of public domain works on their website. Users can download the high-resolution files directly from the website for any non-commercial use, including scholarly publications. Users do not need to pay a fee and will not need to seek permission from the museum. Per the Met’s press release, “the number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.”

The Met joins several other institutions in making high-resolution digital image files of collection objects free available on the web, including Rijksmuseum, LACMA, and the Getty. The Met was one of the first participants in ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing initiative, but in order to use those images, the user needed to be affiliated with an institution that had an ARTstor subscription or request a temporary password. The new OASC program makes the images available directly to the public from the museum’s collections website.

For more information, visit the Met’s FAQ about the OASC initiative or explore their collections website. Images included in the initiative will be indicated

Via the Metropolitan Museum Press Room.

e-Museum of Japan

Looking for images of works of art in the National Museums of Japan? This e-Museum collection of “National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties” contains hundreds of high quality reproductions, robust metadata, and descriptive content. Users can zoom and and pan through images, browse by categories including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, textiles, ceramics, and more. The site features a keyword and an advanced search.

In addition, iPhone and Android apps exist for the e-Museum collection.

For more information, explore the e-Museum of Japan!

Delaware Art Museum Launches Collections Website

The Delaware Art Museum recently launched a collections website via eMuseum which currently features more than 1,000 works of art. By 2018, the museum’s entire collection will be online, “including the largest collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art outside of the United Kingdom …”

Users can interact with the Collections tab by browsing curated collections, searching for individual object records and related artist biographies. Creating an account will allow users to select favorite records and save image groups and research notes.

For more information, visit the link to the Delaware Art Museum’s eMuseum collection or their Collections page.

Via ArtDaily.

35 Million Getty Images Free to Embed and Use Online

Yesterday, Getty Images released more than 35 million images that users can embed on websites and social media posts for free, so long as the images are for editorial and non-commercial purposes. With the embed feature, Getty Images includes a credit line and link to each image that users post. For a list of images available to embed, click here.

There’s been quite a lot of coverage about this monumental release of “free” images, including great articles from the Atlantic on “Why Getty Going Free Is Such a Big Deal, Explained in Getty Images,” and the Verge on “The world’s largest photo service just made its pictures free to use.” It’s important to note that not all Getty Images are free to use, and it’s very likely that contemporary photojournalism images, for example, will remain behind the paywall.

Also fun to think about on a Friday: How many photos have ever been taken?

Access to 15,000+ Comics at the Digital Comic Museum

The Digital Comic Museum has digitized more than 15,000 comic books from the Golden Age of comics, or in the years before 1959. The DCM has a forum for users to submit historical research and commentary on the comics. While you won’t find any Marvel superheroes here, there’s a wide variety of themes within the comic world, including romance, Westerns, combat, crime, supernatural, and horror. Users have to create an account to download images.

Check out the Digital Comic Museum for more information and to download images.

Via Open Culture.

New Online Resource: “This Kiss to the Whole World: Klimt and the Vienna Secession”

The New York Art Resources (NYARC)—a collaboration between the libraries of the Frick Collection, Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art recently launched a new online resource called This Kiss to the Whole World: Klimt and the Vienna Secession.

The website presents the complete catalogs of the Vienna Secession (1898–1905), twenty digitized postcards of exhibition installations, and posters, along with related artworks. The website also features a related bibliography and a timeline of events pertaining to the Vienna Secession.

To learn more, check out This Kiss to the Whole World: Klimt and the Vienna Secession.