LUNA Maintenance, June 11-15

LUNA will undergo routine maintenance from Monday, June 11th until Friday, June 15th. Access to LUNA image collections may be intermittent during this time.

Please consider using ARTstor for image access this week, and contact the VRC with any questions or concerns. Thank you for your patience.

JCB Archive of Early American Images in LUNA

The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University shares its digital archive of early American images with LUNA Commons. With over 7,000 images, this collection includes:

graphic representations of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, drawn entirely from primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825.

LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC for a LUNA tutorial.

Excluding Terms from Searches in LUNA and ARTstor

Are you looking for images of artwork in a certain style or time period, but keep retrieving the same artists over and over? Want to exclude some of the more well-known artists in order to delve more deeply into a topic? Excluding certain words and phrases when searching in databases is often essential. No matter the scenario, the following strategies in LUNA and ARTstor can help you find what you’re looking for.

Excluding Terms in LUNA Searches

In LUNA, Boolean operators don’t work the way you might expect. The “NOT” operator is absent from the advanced search, and it doesn’t work quite right in a keyword search, either. But you can still find what you’re looking for via the following steps:

  • Use a dash (-) to exclude a term from an existing search result. If you want to exclude a phrase, you must put a dash in front of every word.
  • Do not use quotation marks.
  • Example search: house -Frank -Lloyd -Wright (to find houses designed by architects other than Frank Lloyd Wright).
  • As always, these terms entered in the keyword search box will only search the collection you have currently selected. To select a new collection, go to “Collections” in the menu bar and select from the list at left.

 

Excluding Terms in ARTstor Searches

  • ARTstor allows you to exclude words and phrases using the Boolean operator NOT. This function works best when used in the Advanced Search.
  • To exclude certain words from an advanced search, select “NOT” from the drop-down menu at left. If you are excluding a phrase, be sure to use quotation marks.
  • Example search: house NOT “frank lloyd wright” (in creator field)

For more LUNA tutorials, click here. For more ARTstor tutorials, click here. Questions? Feel free to contact us!

 

 

Default Collections in LUNA

Are you getting strange results when searching in LUNA?

The VRC recently made some LUNA collections public (such as the Renaissance Society Archive). By default, LUNA searches these public collections first.

To change the default to search or browse all collections, always access LUNA from the VRC website or the link below:

https://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/s/bdc26x

You can also change your user settings (including default collections) by following the directions here.

Please contact us with any questions!

 

Alice Weston Great Houses in LUNA

Images from the University of Cincinnati Libraries Digital Collections, including architectural photographs by Alice Weston, are available in LUNA Commons:

Environmental artist Alice Weston photographed many of the houses in this collection in the 1990s for the publication Great Houses of the Queen City : Two Hundred Years of Historic and Contemporary Architecture and Interiors in Cincinnati, text by Walter E. Langsam, 1997. This collection of over 1400 images includes not only the photographs seen the book, but many more interior and exterior views as well as other properties not included in the publication.

LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC for a LUNA tutorial.

Museum and Online Archive of California in LUNA

Over 77,000 images from the Museum and Online Archive of California are available in LUNA Commons:

Selected works from the permanent collections of eight California museums: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; Japanese American National Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California, Los Angeles; Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles; California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside.

LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC if you have any questions or would like a LUNA tutorial!

 

Teach and Present with the iPad 2

Tired of lugging your laptop from class to class? Try teaching and presenting with your iPad 2 instead! The iPad 2 can connect to a projector through a VGA adapter, just like your laptop. You can open PowerPoint and Keynote presentations in the Keynote app for iPad. Here’s what you’ll need:

Once you’ve navigated to your presentation online (or in Keynote), click to open. If loading from the web, click again on “Open in Keynote.” Keep in mind that some formatting may be lost in translation from PowerPoint to Keynote, or from your laptop to your iPad. See this guide from Apple Support on best practices for creating a presentation on a Mac for use on an iPad. Some quick tips:

  • The simpler your presentation, the more likely it will open properly on iPad.
  • Swipe or tap iPad’s screen to switch slides.
  • Presenter notes will show up on iPad, but you must select that option from the menu at upper right.
  • Use simple fonts; unrecognizable fonts will automatically be replaced with Helvetica.
  • Resize images before inserting them in your presentation; this allows for quicker download.
  • Do not plan to transmit audio; currently projection from iPad 2 only works for video.
  • The first generation iPad does not support projection or mirroring.

You may also use iPad 2 to present media groups or slide shows in LUNA. LUNA mirrors from iPad 2 seamlessly! Contact the VRC if you’d like a demonstration.

Unfortunately, iPad is not yet fully compatible with ARTstor but you can access some ARTstor functionality on iPad with their mobile app.

PLEASE NOTE: Your iPad displays all passwords character-by-character as you enter them. Right now there is no way to change this option. Wait until you have logged in to Chalk, email, LUNA, or other websites before connecting iPad 2 to the projector.

If you have any questions about teaching with iPad 2, or if you’d like to borrow an iPad 2 and adapter to try out the possibilities, please contact the VRC.