Tag: News

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The Morgan Begins Digitizing 10,000 Drawings

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York recently announced that it is embarking on a year-long program to digitize its collection of more than 10,000 drawings (including 2,000 versos) dating from the 14th to 21st centuries. The images will be available in a digital library that will provide a robust catalog record with a high resolution image. The digital library will be open to the public, and images will be available for download for use in non-commercial situations including “classroom presentations, dissertations, and educational websites devoted to the fine arts.”

So, get excited about the new digital library, which will hopefully be ready for launch in October 2014. The Morgan has future plans to digitize their print collection, which would be another fantastic resource.

For more information about the project, check out the Morgan’s press release. In the meantime, don’t forget that the Morgan has other valuable online resources available now, including Collection Highlights, Online Exhibitions, and Music Manuscripts.

Via ArtDaily

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Natural History Images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of libraries that are digitizing materials pertaining to biodiversity within their collections. While the majority of the digital collection contains text and scientific literature, the books and historic journals and albums the BHL is digitizing often contain high quality natural history images.

The BHL is pulling the images from their digital library and hosting them online in Flickr, with minimal metadata in the Flickr record and a link back to the official record in the BHL digital library for a full catalog record. There are more than 1,600 sets of images in the BHL’s Flickr collection, making it a fantastically rich resource for natural history images in the public domain.

For more information, check out the BHL Flickr page!

Image from Flore médicale /. Paris: Imprimerie de C.L.F. Panckoucke, 1828-1832.

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The Getty Adds Special Collections Materials to Open Content Program

In mid-October, the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections announced that it has added 5,400 artwork images from special collections to the Open Content Program, which brings the total number of images that are freely available without copyright restrictions to more than 10,000.

The newly added content includes “artist’ sketchbooks, drawings and watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks, and early photographs of the Middle East and Asia.” For example, there are more than thirty early photographs from Mayan archaeological sites.

For more information, check out our previous blog post on the Getty’s Open Content Program, or explore the 10,000 public domain images here!

Via The Getty Iris

Image: [Nunnery complex (Uxmal, Mexico): detail of facade frieze], 1882, GRI Digital Collections, 94-F125.

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From the Archives: Guggenheim’s Online Exhibition Catalogs

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has made nearly 100 exhibition catalogs freely available online as part of a digitized collection called “From the Archives.” Their offering of catalogs includes single-artist exhibitions as well as multi-artist exhibitions about movements or styles, and some stand alone essays published by the museum.

The Guggenheim has made other library resources available digitally in the collection Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently made a trove of digitized exhibition catalogs available in MetPublications.

 

 

 

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Artsy Launches New iPhone App

We’ve been covering the news about Artsy since its launch in October 2012 and the announcement earlier this month that it is releasing more than 25,000 images for download. Their next big move is the debut of an iPhone app that takes full advantage of many features in the newly released iOS 7.

The Artsy App is free to downloaded and is updated daily. Currently, it contains more than 50,000 high quality images of artworks that can be searched or browsed across several categories, including subject matter, medium/technique, and style and movement. The app also contains up-to-date information about art world happenings, including exhibitions, art fairs, and auctions.

You can take advantage of the new Parallax feature in iOS 7, which helps Artsy’s feature “View in Room” to engage with artworks as if they were in a gallery setting. Users can also email works of art, save, copy, and print directly from within the app.

We’ve installed the Artsy App on the VRC’s iPad, so feel free to check it out on your own or swing by the VRC to see ours!

Via ArtDaily.

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Recent Improvements to ARTstor

In August, ARTstor made several improvements to the ARTstor Digital Library, including:

  • Export 2,000 images to PowerPoint in a 120-day period with up to 150 images per download. (Was previously 1,000 images in a 120-day period).
  • Browse through image groups from the Image Group Panel. After opening an Image Group, there will be a tab in the Image Group panel where you can navigate to another image group.

If you have any questions about ARTstor’s new (or old!) features, please do not hesitate to get in contact with the VRC.

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Largest Film Camera in the World in Chicago

The world’s largest film camera is currently at Two North Riverside Plaza, and will be there through Thursday, October 31. The camera was built in order to be used in a project by photographer Dennis Manarchy, from Rockford, IL, called Butterflies & Buffalo: Tales of American Culture.

The camera is 35 feet long, and makes photographs that are larger than life size—more than six feet tall and four feet wide! Manarchy’s project is to make portraits to document at least 50 distinct cultural groups in the United States and plans to travel more than 20,000 miles in order to capture such wide diversity. I’m curious about how they’ll make a darkroom big enough to develop a piece of film that’s bigger than they are!

For more information, visit the Butterflies & Buffalo website, watch the preview for the project on Vimeo, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or swing by the West Loop to see the camera for yourself.

Via Chicagoist

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Search, Save, and Share Images from the Art Institute’s Online Collections

The Art Institute of Chicago‘s digital collections database offers a feature called “My Collections” that allows users to do several things:

  • Create a user profile and log in
  • Search for and select works of art from their web collection
  • Create multiple My Collections and choose which one you want to save an image to
  • Personalize My Collections by adding descriptive notes
  • Share My Collections with others via an emailed link (and people you’ve shared My Collections with will be able to see your notes!)

For more information, read about My Collections or explore the Art Institute’s Online Collections.

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Europeana Open Culture App

This summer, the Europeana digital library launched its first app, Open Culture, which includes a selection of 350,000 images from its online collection of cultural objects from Europe’s institutions. The app is organizied around five curated themes, including Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature, and Images of the Past.

Users can perform keyword searches in the app, or browse through a visual wall of image thumbnails. You can also save favorites, add comments, and share object records on Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps best of all: the images included in the Europeana Open Culture app are either in the public domain or openly licensed, so they may be used for any publishing purpose.

For more information, stop by the VRC to explore Open Culture on our iPad, or visit the App Store.

Via Europeana Blog

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