All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

Founded in 1949, the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY is the world’s oldest museum of photography and recently announced that it will be the first photography museum to join the Google Art Project:

So far, 50 high-resolution images from their collection—encompassing the birth of photography to the late 20th century—have been added to the Google Art Project website with zooming capabilities and robust cataloging information, and much of the object data was previously unavailable online. More photographs will eventually be added, and the GEH is also partnering with Google Maps Street View to provide 360º views of their galleries and grounds.

For more information, visit the George Eastman House in Google Art Project or read the GEH Press Release.

Via PetaPixel

Tags: free images, George Eastman House, Google Art Project, Museums, online images, photographs, photography

From ARTstor:

Please be advised that we will be performing an upgrade to the ARTstor Digital Library on Tuesday, April 16th between 6:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST. During this time, users will be able to access the Digital Library but may experience some slowness. This upgrade will eliminate the need for Java in the ARTstor Digital Library and single image downloads will be delivered in Zip files (find out why here).

If you have any difficulty with ARTstor on Tuesday morning, we suggest using LUNA for your image needs. If you are having problems with ARTstor after 1 pm EST, please contact userservices@artstor.org.

Oxford Art Online dramatically expanded their coverage of photography in April 2014:

This season Grove Art Online is pleased to present a group of more than 60 new and significantly updated articles on the topic of photography, developed in part in response to frequent reader requests for more expansive coverage of the history and practice of photography in Grove. The centerpiece of the project is a group of 16 new and significantly updated articles on key movements and concepts, including important pieces on documentary photography, digital photography, and the worker photography movement. The update also includes a set of 44 new biographies, South African photographer Ernest Cole, female portraitist Zaida Ben-Yosuf, 19th-century critic Francis Wey, and 20th-century curator John Szarkowski. Filling out this season’s update are another 90 photography-related articles with fully updated bibliographies to incorporate the latest research. Many thanks are due to the dedicated and accomplished scholars who contributed to this update, as well as to the institutions and individuals who generously provided over 120 stunning new illustrations to promote understanding of the texts. This new material complements Grove’s existing coverage of photography around the globe, and sets the stage for continued growth in coming years.

For access to Oxford Art Online (University of Chicago affiliates only), click here. To go directly to the newly updated Photography content, click here.

Tags: humanities research, research

The Internet Archive is a collection of digitized or born-digital materials with cultural significance. It is comprised of many unique collections including NASA images, Project Gutenberg, Classic Comics, live music by the Grateful Dead, and of course the ever-popular Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is free and open to the public, and since most of their materials are in the public domain, they are available for downloading or streaming in a variety of file formats—for example, full text books can be viewed as PDFs or as EPUB files for your e-reader. The Internet Archive is free and open to the public, and collaborates with universities and museums around the world to ingest new collections and materials.

The recently launched Internet Archive Companion app makes the collections of the Internet Archive easily accessible on your iPad or iPhone. The developer’s website notes:

It’s a free app enabling you to browse the enormous collections of videos/movies, music/sound, books and images in an intimate, consumable way! Flip though the pages of scanned books, or flip through the text copies of books, including many from Project Gutenberg (to name just one of the many sources of The Internet Archive.)

For more information, visit the Internet Archive Companion app or stop by the VRC to test it out.

Tags: iPad, iPhone, just for fun, research

The Public Art Archive, launched in 2009, is a collective online resource of public art examples from around the world. The site features fully cataloged works, sophisticated searching, browse-by lists, and a mapping function using Google Maps.

The Public Art Archive™ houses thousands of public artwork records in a single, centrally located database, making these works easily accessible to all audiences, including researchers, authors, academics, policy-makers, tourists, artists, administrators, and the general public. The Archive is the only resource of its kind that offers the field standardized and highly rigorous metadata structures, controlled taxonomies, advanced mapping features, and sophisticated search and filter tools.

For more information, visit the Public Art Archive or click here to find out about how to add your own images.

Tags: online images, public art

post Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe is an interactive platform hosted by the Museum of Modern Art that encourages participation in a wide variety of discussions pertaining to the contemporary art and archives. This began as the public face for MoMA’s research program C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative):

post is a site for encounters between the established and experimental, the historical and emerging, the local and global, the scholarly and artistic. An online journal, archive, exhibition space, and open forum that takes advantage of the nonhierarchical nature of the Internet, post seeks to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined. The site’s contents are intended to build nuanced understandings of the histories that shape the practices of artists and institutions today. As a networked platform, post aims to provide an alternative to the model of a unified art historical

For more information, visit post.

Tags: digital archives, digital humanities, Museums

The University for the Creative Arts recently launched a digital collection of material from Zandra Rhodes‘ personal archive of fashion materials. Rhodes was a student of UCA  The press release notes that contextual and didactic content has been put on the website in addition to the

… 500 dresses and garments that have been painstakingly prepared, catalogued and photographed over the past 18 months for the Collection which has been created for the education community through a collaborative project between UCA and the Zandra Rhodes Studio, with funding from Jisc.

The robust digital collection features photographs and detail views of 500 finished garment (with fully cataloged descriptions), more than 100 pages of fashion drawings presented as fully digitized sketchbooks (using Turning the Pages software), and many videos of Rhodes speaking about her working process and career.

For more information and to explore the website, visit the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection.

Tags: archives, fashion, online images

To accompany their recently opened exhibition The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display, the Getty released a mobile app of the same name. The exhibition, which opened in February, looks at only four objects in the museum’s collection, but it does so in extreme detail to encourage users to consider the entire “life” of the object, long before it entered the museum’s collection.

Their app of the same name allows iPad users to explore the same four objects in the installation, providing a 360-degree view of the objects as well as information about the technique used in the objects creation, the history and cultural context of the style, and any damage that came from the object’s use over time.

For more information, visit the Life of Art app or stop by the VRC to check out this app and many other art apps on our iPad 2.

Tags: digital humanities, iPad, mobile applications, technology

The Getty launched an app to go along with its exhibition Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance, which ran from November 2012–February 2013. The app explores 7 objects from the exhibition in depth, including slide shows, animations, X-Ray and UV photographs, and pan and zoom functionality.

For more information, visit the Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance iPad app, or stop by the VRC to check ours out!

Tags: iPad, mobile applications, Museums, research, technology

Good news for ARTstor image users! ARTstor has eliminated the need for the Java plugin to download images from their digital library. ARTstor writes:

After our update, users who download single image files will receive a zip file that contains a JPEG image and an HTML file with the associated metadata. In addition to removing the need for Java, using zip will allow ARTstor to pursue other feature enhancements, such as additional options for image group downloads.

Mac users should have a problem, but PC users might have to install software to unzip the image folder. ARTstor suggests using 7Zip if you’re one of the affected users. Please feel free to contact the VRC if you’re having any issues downloading images from ARTstor.

Via ARTstor Blog

Tags: ARTstor, vrc