Tag: research

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Using Pinterest to Organize Research

Pinterest isn’t just for bookmarking your home decorating inspirations and favorite recipes. It’s an online “pinboard” that allows users to organize and share images, video, and other web-based information, and could be used as an organizational tool for research.

How it works: once you’ve requested and signed up for an account, you can create various boards for organizing your pins. Boards act a bit like folders, because they keep images and sites together. Boards could be based on themes, research interests, current projects, and so on.

Once you’ve created a board or two, start pinning! Make sure to include the link to the original source, both for your own reference and for copyright reasons. Keep in mind that all boards on Pinterest are currently public. See Pinterest’s copyright page for more information.

While Pinterest is great for visually organizing web-based research and fostering ideas, it does not automatically capture sufficient citation information and should be used in conjunction with a robust citation management tool like Zotero. For more information about citation management tools, visit Regenstein’s Endnote, Zotero, and RefWorks spring quarter office hours on Mondays at 3pm at the TECHB@R.

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Excluding Terms from Searches in LUNA and ARTstor

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!

 

 

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The Tibetan and Himalayan Library Image Collections

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.

 

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Zotero Workshop at Regenstein

Are you interested in learning how to manage your research? Feeling bogged down by bibliographies? Try Zotero! Learn how at a workshop on Friday, November 4th, at the Regenstein Library:

With a single click, Zotero saves citations and allows you to create customized bibliographies in standard citation styles, including MLA, Chicago and APA. This hands-on workshop will introduce some of the key functions of Zotero such as: installing the Zotero extension in your web browser, adding citations to your Zotero library, organizing and managing your citations, creating a bibliography, and using the Microsoft Word plug-in to easily insert citations from Zotero into your documents.

Workshop is from 12-1pm in Regenstein 127.

 

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Early JSTOR Content Freely Available Online

From JSTOR:

On September 6, 2011, we announced that we are making journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR.

This content, including images, may be used for any non-commercial purposes. Access to journals includes over forty Art and Art History titles, a list of which may be viewed in a PDF here. Access is provided through JSTOR’s website. Be sure to click Advanced Search and then check “Include Only Content I Can Access.” After searching, you can also limit to “Only Results with Images.”

 

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Possible Uses for Google+ in the Classroom

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 comprehend. 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.

 

 

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Need Help Finding Images in LUNA?

Are you looking for images for a class presentation or paper? The VRC is here to help!

LUNA is the Department of Art History’s teaching resource of more than 165,000 digital images designed for use in conjunction with current classes. To access this database, click here. You will be prompted to login with a Cnet ID and password.

Next, you can browse the Art History Department Image Collection by clicking the center link.

Narrow your results using the What, Where, Who and When facets on the left.

Keyword search is at upper right. To do an advanced search, click the link under the keyword search box.

Limit your search to the Art History Department Image Collection, and then search any of the fields in the drop-down menu. Limiting to this collection allows searching of more specific fields, though you may find searching multiple collections useful as well.

Now that you’ve found some relevant images, you may want to return to them later. Use the Share This function to email yourself a link to your search results, or create a media group to access at a later time.

To learn more about searching for images in LUNA, please feel free to contact the VRC to schedule an appointment. We provide image searching orientation for individuals and small groups. Additional VRC-created LUNA tutorials and LUNA-provided flash tutorials are also available.

 

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Photographing Archival Materials

Before embarking on a research trip, you might prepare to photograph materials in libraries and archives. It can be difficult to capture quality images of archival materials, especially in low-light situations. A recent guest post on ProfHacker details one way of stabilizing a digital camera, which includes using a clamp, articulated arm and wired camera remote as a sort of portable copy stand.

Keep in mind that some of the processes advocated in the article will not be allowed in all archives or libraries. Check with archives, museums or libraries before your visit to ask about policies; most will have specific requirements for equipment used in reading rooms. If you have questions about cameras or other photography best practices, please contact the VRC.

Via Derivative Image.

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Highlighting the Digital Humanities

The article “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches” recently published in the New York Times discusses the growing importance of data and technology to research in the humanities.

The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.

The focus on digital humanities is timely; this weekend the Visual Resources Center and the Division of the Humanities are co-sponsoring, along with the Newberry Library and Northwestern University, the very first THATCamp Chicago. THATCamp Chicago is a user-generated “unconference” where humanists and technologists work together for the common good. For more information, click here.

See also the University of Chicago Press’ recent blog entry exploring the top five recent books about new methodologies in the digital humanities.

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NYARC: The New York Art Resources Consortium

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.

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