Yesterday Google Art Project launched an impressive expansion which now includes 30,000 high-resolution images from more than 150 museums worldwide. Last year the project included just 1,000 images, mostly of Western paintings. Today’s Google Art Project includes greater cultural diversity as well as photographs, street art, and more. The project is freely available to the public online.

Using a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners, we have created a unique online art experience. Users can explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail, take a virtual tour of a museum and even build their own collections to share.

Additional images from the Art Institute of Chicago are now available in Google’s online galleries. The upgrade was announced at the Art Institute yesterday, with Google president Margo Georgiadis welcomed by mayor Rahm Emanuel. Read more about the project here.

Google Goggles is a mobile app that uses images to search the Internet. Not long ago Google introduced their reverse-image search to the web; the concept of Google Goggles is similar, but takes functionality even further. For example: not sure who designed that famous building you’re seeing as a tourist in Rome? Having trouble translating that Italian dinner menu? Want more information about a book, logo, bottle of wine, or painting? There’s now an app for that!

Additionally, in collaboration with Google, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 76,000 two-dimensional works of art from their collection accessible through Google Goggles. If you want to know more about a work of art exhibited in the museum, you can take a picture and search for it via Google Goggles to quickly see authoritative and contextual information from the Met. This information will also display if you see a work belonging to the Met in a book, on a banner, or elsewhere in the world. Check out this video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an illustrated introduction to the partnership.

The app is free and available on both iPhone (iOS 4.0) and Android (2.1+) platforms. If you’ve already downloaded iOS 5.0 for iPhone, the app won’t work, but we hope that a fix for this is under development!

Via Technology in the Arts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, so ancient and fragile that direct light cannot shine on them, are now available to search and read online in a project launched today by the Israel Museum and Google Inc.

Via Bloomberg. See the scrolls online here.

Did you know? You can now drag image files from your computer into the Google Image search bar to perform an image-based search. Like Tineye, this ability to do a reverse search for images may help users connect images lacking data with information on the Internet. Google will also tell you the pixel dimensions of your image and link to alternate sizes, if available.

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.

Works from the 16th and 17th centuries by Kepler, Galileo and Nostradamus have been digitally reformatted and are available in color via Google Books. Traditionally, such manuscripts have been scanned in black-and-white; Google’s color scans allow for a more accurate experience of the originals.

Some of the foundational texts now available in color include Nostradamus’ Prognostication nouvelle et prediction portenteuse (1554), Johannes Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae from 1635, and Galileo’s Systema cosmicum from 1641. All texts can be viewed online, or downloaded as a PDF (although the PDF’s lack color)…

Via Open Culture.

Google recently launched its Art Project, a collaborative venture with art museums from around the world. The project aims to provide both virtual tours of museum galleries using Google’s street-view technology as well as high-resolution photography of artworks, allowing for remarkable zoom capability. The site also encourages visitors to sign in and create collections of favorites to share with friends.

For more information, visit the Art Project’s FAQ page.

If you’ve tried a Google image search over the past week, you might have noticed some changes. Google recently launched a “new dense tiled layout,” with larger thumbnails and the ability to scroll through up to 1,000 images on a single page. If you click on a thumbnail, you’re now brought to a “hover pane,” showing the image as it “hovers” above the original website (and thus how the image might look in its original context).

There are other less visible changes, too: more sophisticated technology powers both the “similar images” tool and “similar colors” tool. You can read more about these changes on the Official Google Blog.

Two new projects utilize Google Maps and historical photography to create composite views of contemporary city streets. The Museum of London‘s free mobile application, Streetmuseum, combines GPS and photographs from the museum’s collections to create an interactive visual exploration of London history.

Hold your camera up to the present day street scene and the same London location appears on your screen, offering you a window through time. Want to know more? Simply tap the information button for historical facts.

Historypin, a web-based project created by We Are What We Do in partnership with Google, pairs viewer-submitted photographs and their geographical coordinates with Google Street View, allowing for multiple snapshots of the same space throughout time. Viewers can also submit personal stories about specific places.

Google recently announced new advanced search options for images. These options include searching Google Images by size, color, and image type (like photo, line drawing, clip art, and more). You may also search by usage rights. To try out this new feature, click here.