All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

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

Welcome back to campus! During winter quarter 2013, you may notice some differences in available ARTstor image collections. Due to changes in the structure of the ARTstor image hosting program, the University of Chicago will not continue hosting its Visual Resources Center or Archivision Library collections there at this time. Hosted images previously saved to image groups and folders will no longer appear in those places. However, all images from the Visual Resources Center Collection and Archivision Library Base Collection remain active in LUNA. The university’s subscription to the 1-million+ images in ARTstor’s main digital library will continue without interruption.

Please contact the VRC with any questions.

Last summer we announced that the Renaissance Society Archive was made publicly available through LUNA, and now we are pleased to announce that as of this week, it is now available in ARTstor as well.

ARTstor and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago are sharing nearly 2,400 images of contemporary art and exhibition installation views in the Digital Library. This collection features painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and multi-media work by seminal contemporary artists who exhibited at the Renaissance Society, including Nancy Spero, Raymond Pettibon, Francis Alÿs, Eva Hesse, Kerry James Marshall, Shahzia Sikander, and others.

From its opening in 1915, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago has been a leading space for innovative contemporary art and programming, exhibiting important and challenging work by leading contemporary artists, often early in their careers, before they are shown in major museums and galleries.

You can view the collection in ARTstor or LUNA, and click here for more information on the ARTstor collection or about the Renaissance Society generally.

Via ARTstor Blog

Above image: Thomas Struth. Hörder Brückenstrasse, Dortmund, 1985. Exhibited at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

ARTstor has signed an Online Art Agreement (OLA) with Artists Rights Society (ARS) on behalf of six additional international visual arts organizations covering more than 10,000 new artists from six countries. This substantially expands the ARTstor Digital Library’s modern and contemporary artworks for subscribers.

The agreements cover the following affiliates of ARS:

VISCOPY – Australia

SODRAC – Canada

VBK – Austria

KUVASTO – Finland

SOMAAP – Mexico

AUTVIS – Brazil

Dr. Theodore Feder, President of the Artists Rights Society, said “We are very pleased to further expand our collaboration and to contribute to the many authorized images offered by ARTstor for the important purposes of teaching, research, and study.

Above: Jose Clemente Orozco, one of the artists to be included in this new agreement, photographed by Edward Weston.

Did you know? ARTstor offers Images for Academic Publishing, allowing you to publish high-quality images in non-commercial publications (including websites) according to terms & conditions set by contributing museums.

The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge. The IAP program was initiated by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 to help address the challenges of scholarly publishing in the digital age by providing free images for academic publications through an automated Web-based service. IAP is now available as an optional service to all museums who wish to foster scholarly publications.

To find these images, add IAP to your search string. You can also browse by collection here.

Above image: Hat, Day by Sally Victor, 1944. Image Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes.

ARTstor has recently added and expanded some exciting collections in the digital library:

ARTstor has collaborated with George Eastman House to share more than 1,000 additional photographs in the Digital Library. This addition includes 600 images by Lewis Hines along with works by pivotal figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Southworth & Hawes, and Walker Evans.

ARTstor has released more than 4,000 additional images from the Peabody Museum of Natural History’s permanent collection and photographic archives in the Digital Library. The Museum is contributing approximately 10,000 images from its archival collections, a majority of which consist of archaeological and ethnographic objects from throughout the Caribbean, including Antigua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic and other islands, as well as northern South America.

The entire collection of nearly 6,000 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brooklyn Museum Costumes is now available in the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program. In addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, IAP’s founding partner, ARTstor is pleased to announce that seven important institutions are participating, including: The Getty Research Institute, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton University Art Museum, Northwestern University Library, and University of California, Irvine, and Bryn Mawr College.

ARTstor and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have released more than 750 images of major artworks from the permanent collection in the Digital Library. The images document the Guggenheim Museum’s superb holdings in modern and contemporary art by such significant artists as Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Paul Klee, Robert Mapplethorpe, Claes Oldenburg, Cindy Sherman, and Vincent van Gogh, among many others.

For more information about ARTstor collections or for an ARTstor tutorial, please contact the VRC.

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!

If you are experiencing difficulties seeing your image groups or folders in ARTstor, try clearing your browser cache and then reloading. ARTstor updated the digital library this morning, which caused this temporary problem. For instructions on clearing your cache, please click here.

Check out ARTstor’s recent blog post which includes links to some unexpected Valentine’s Day images. Enjoy!

November 14, 2011 update:

ARTstor released a Lion-compatible version of OIV today. For more information please click here.

November 14, 2011 update:

Many thanks to ATV reader Charles Choi, founder of YummyMelon software, for sending us a workaround to run OIV on Mac OS X Lion. After a brief local test (thanks, Peter Leonard!), it does seems to work:

Hello -

I’m writing to you in letting you know of a workaround to get your OIV app to work on OS X 10.7 (Lion). The short of it is to get replace the file “JavaApplicationStub” within the app with the one existing on Lion as described in this link:

http://informagen.com/JarBundler/StubFile.html

Please refer this procedure list to one who is conversant with the Unix command line:

Run Terminal and change to the directory holding OIV.app
cd OIV.app/Contents/MacOS
rm JavaApplicationStub
cp /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub .

This procedure was successful in getting OIV.app to run on Lion. That said the app is not fully tested as that’s your responsibility. But in the interim, you can let your users know that this workaround exists.

Best regards -

-Charles Choi

Charles Y. Choi, Ph.D.
Founder – Yummy Melon Software LLC
charles.choi@yummymelon.com | http://www.yummymelon.com

Original Post:

ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) is not yet compatible with the newest Mac operating system, OS 10.7 (OS X Lion). From ARTstor:

At ARTstor we strive to make both the ARTstor Digital Library and the OIV compatible with as many different browsers and operating systems as possible. We are only able to begin the process of making the OIV compatible once a new operating system is released. We received OS X Lion when it was released to the public and have been working to make the OIV compatible with it.

Currently, we have a version of the OIV with our Quality Assurance testers but I am unable to provide a firm date for the release of the OS X Lion compatible version of the OIV. Please know that we are working to get a compatible version to our users as soon as possible.

For more information about ARTstor OIV system requirements, click here. University of Chicago community members who have questions or need suggestions for working around this problem should contact the VRC. Others should contact ARTstor directly.