The Developing Room is a working group devoted to the study and practice of photography. Founded in 2008, the Developing Room is based at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Our mission is to promote innovative work in the field of photography studies by organizing public projects and fostering international collaboration.

Click here for more information about this group.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) collections of images are indexed by THL’s Place Dictionary and Knowledge Maps for easy exploration. View over 60,000 photos of Tibet and the Himalayas, many with links to maps.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library is a publisher of websites, information services, and networking facilities relating to the Tibetan plateau and southern Himalayan regions. THL promotes the integration of knowledge and community across the divides of academic disciplines, the historical and the contemporary, the religious and the secular, the global and the local.

Images are linked together by topic, location, and collection for easy browsing and context. For more information, see the library’s main site.

A recent blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the differences between social networking sites Facebook and Google+, and some of the potential uses for Google+ in the classroom:

Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research… In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a “circle” and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it.

See also an article from journalism professor Jeremy Littau on “Why Lehigh (and every other) University needs to be on Gplus. Now.” His explanation includes a plan to hold virtual office hours using the Google+ Hangout feature.

The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) was made public this week. MAIA started as the result of a long-term effort to document and preserve the modern artistic works from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, most of which were lost and damaged in the fires and looting during the  aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. As the site shows, very little is known about many of the works, including their current whereabouts and their original location in the Museum. The lack of documents about modern Iraqi art prompted the growth of the project to include supporting text. The site makes the works of art available as an open access database in order to raise public awareness of the many lost works and to encourage interested individuals to participate in helping to document the museum’s original and/or lost holdings…

Via Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR).

The Photography, Video and Visual Journalism blog for the New York Times, Lens, has revealed their interactive mosaic of photographs which were solicited on Sunday, May 2nd, from readers around the world. The mosaic takes shape as a globe covered with stacks of the digital photographs, corresponding in location to where they were captured at a single moment in time. The globe can be “spun” in any direction to explore various locations, and pictures can be searched by topic: community, arts and entertainment, family, money and the economy, nature and the environment, play, religion, social issues or work. Image-specific URLs are also available so that you can return to your favorite photographs again and again.

Wherever you are, we hope you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And we hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.

Read more about this project on Lens, the Photography, Video and Visual Journalism blog for the New York Times. Submit your photographs here (link will be active after 15:00 on May 2nd).

In 2006, the Met, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Frick Collection teamed up to create NYARC: the New York Art Resources Consortium, a system which unites the resources and libraries of these institutions and makes them more accessible to both scholars and the general public. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC seeks to extend library and archive resources, services, and programming to a wider audience, and to facilitate collaboration between leading art research institutions.

Through NYARC’s website you can access the 800,000-record ARCADE database, which serves as a cohesive online source for the combined holdings of the Frick, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum. There is also a portal for WATSONLINE, the online catalog for the Museum of Modern Art. Finally, links to news posts alert you to current projects like the JSTOR Auction Catalog Pilot Project and new holdings in the NYARC museums.

To view the New York Times’ profile of NYARC, refer to this article from March 14th, 2010.

This blog post was contributed by student staff member Emilia Mickevicius.