All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

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.

Michelle Caswell of the South Asian American Digital Archive provides a helpful description of community-based archives:

We continue to see SAADA as part of a growing movement of independent grassroots efforts emerging from within communities to collect, preserve, and make accessible records documenting their own histories outside of mainstream archival institutions. These community-based archives serve as an alternative venue for communities to make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, to shape collective memory of their own pasts, and to control the means through which stories about their past are constructed.

Gothic Past is an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture. It is part of a research project in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, which is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). The site showcases images from three significant collections of image archives housed in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College. They include the Stalley Collection and the Rae Collection of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture: photographic images that were created and collected from the 1930s to the present day. A third archive contains the O’Donovan collection of Irish Gothic moulding profiles.

Registered users can group and save images for later reference, and can use these groups as presentation tools. In the future, users will be able to submit their own images for inclusion.

The New York Times recently began posting digitized photographs from their “morgue” (or archive) on Tumblr, including the reverse sides with notes from the photographers, notes about how the photograph was used, captions, and more.

We’re eager to share historical riches that have been locked away from public view, and have been awaiting a platform like Tumblr that makes it easy to do so. We hope you’ll enjoy the serendipity of discovery, that you’ll know something of the thrill we feel when we unlock the door of the morgue and walk into a treasure house made of filing cabinets, index cards, manila folders and more 8-by-10s than anyone can count.

A diagram of possibilities for deciphering the reverse-side notes can be found here (near the bottom of the page). Creators of the project plan to post several photographs on Tumblr every week.

The Cranach Digital Archive (cda) is an interdisciplinary collaborative research resource, providing access to art historical, technical and conservation information on paintings by Lucas Cranach (c.1472 – 1553) and his workshop. The repository presently provides information on more than 400 paintings including c.5000 images and documents from 19 partner institutions.

The metadata is extensive, with especially detailed provenance information. Images for most works include high-resolution overall views, reverse views, infrared images, UV images, detail images, and photomicrographs.

Malaysia Design Archive is a project to map the development of graphic design in Malaysia from the period before independence (1957) until now. It is a space to trace and document Malaysian ‘endangered’ design legacy, to preserve our historical past, as well as to create a resource of Malaysian design work.

This is also another way to protect our history, provide us with space to question its meaning, recurring imagery, icons used, ideas, and how it is connected to the our political landscape at the time. This project aims to highlight the importance of archiving as a way protect and preserve our own visual history.

Via South Asian American Digital Archive.

NYPL Labs is proud to bring you the Stereogranimator, a tool for transforming historical stereographs from The New York Public Library’s vast collections into shareable 3D web formats. This site is all about your participation, so have fun with it, experiment with it, and let us know how we can improve it. In fact, this project wouldn’t even exist if it hadn’t been for a user like yourself getting creative with library collections. Here’s the story of how that happened…

 

The Nicholar Artamonoff Collection at Dumbarton Oaks, an archive of historical photographs of Byzantine Turkey, is available online.

The Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection includes 543 photographs taken in Istanbul and five archaeological sites in Western Turkey (Ephesus, Hierapolis, Laodicea on the Lycus, Pergamum, Priene) from 1935 to 1945. The high quality photographs are of great value as they show buildings, sites, and objects that no longer exist or are in a better state of preservation than today.

Photographs may be browsed by tag (keyword), site name, and geography. Each photograph also includes a correlating Google Map, allowing visitors to see historical

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!

Archivists at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are currently processing the papers of Robert L. Van Nice and blogging about the process. Robert L. Van Nice undertook an extensive architectural survey of Hagia Sophia between 1937 and 1985. His collection includes fieldwork materials, architectural drawings, and photographs, and some of these have been digitized and posted to the blog.