Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
Inaugurated in Italy, the Virtual Museum of Iraq includes tours of treasures from Baghdad’s National Museum:
Available in Arabic, English and Italian, the Virtual Museum of Iraq offers visitors the opportunity to move through eight virtual galleries and see highlights from the collection from the prehistoric to the Islamic period. Animated videoclips provide details.
Over 77,000 images from the Museum and Online Archive of California are available in LUNA Commons:
Selected works from the permanent collections of eight California museums: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; Japanese American National Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California, Los Angeles; Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles; California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside.
LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC if you have any questions or would like a LUNA tutorial!
We’ve all done it…walked or driven by a building and thought, “I wish I could see what the inside looks like”. Well, now you can.
Over the weekend of Oct 15-16, 2011, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is proud to present openhousechicago 2011 (OHC2011), a free public event that gets you behind-the-scenes of some of the city’s greatest spaces and places.
Whether you are an architecture buff, history enthusiast, or cultural novice, OHC2011 is a unique event that’s fun for all ages, locals and visitors, suburbanites and city dwellers. Participating in OHC2011 is like getting a “backstage pass” to many of Chicago’s most important and interesting buildings.
openhousechicago is a free public event. You can plan your own itinerary. No reservations or tickets are required, but you can register for up-to-date information and to win prizes.
The Walters Art Museum announces the launch of its redesigned works of art website with the removal of copyright restrictions on more than 10,000 online artwork images through a Creative Commons license . In addition to being able to download these images for free, the site introduces a new look and feel, and enhanced searching, tagging and community collections features. The website now has additional information about the artworks, including nearly a century of history concerning exhibitions and conservation treatments. It is also substantially more accessible to users with disabilities due to its increased compliance with the United States government’s internet accessibility standards.
The Creative Commons license specifies that these images may not be used for commercial purposes. Publication in not-for-profit academic journals or dissertations is probably approved, but you may consider contacting the museum or journal for more information.
For a full list of copyright-free and -lenient images for academic publication, click here.
Are you teaching or presenting with your iPad 2? Want to avoid e-mailing large PowerPoint or Keynote presentations to yourself? It’s easy to to sync presentations to iPad using iTunes and your Keynote app.
First, connect your iPad to your computer. iTunes should launch automatically (if not, open iTunes from your dock or Applications folder). On the left panel in iTunes, under Devices you should see your iPad. Click to highlight it.
Next, navigate to the menu tab for Apps.
Scroll down to see File Sharing options. On the left you will see any apps that allow file sharing between your computer and iPad.
To sync presentations, select Keynote. At right you will see the list of Keynote Documents that have been synced to your iPad. To start loading presentations (in either PowerPoint or Keynote format), click “Add…” then navigate to wherever you’ve saved the presentations on your computer. Then select Open. The presentation will be added to your list of documents.
After adding your presentations, click Sync at bottom right in iTunes. Your presentations will now be available in your Keynote app on iPad.
Please contact the VRC with any questions!
The Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a new website this week, complete with high-resolution images available for download (for educational purposes).To download a high-res image, either search or browse the collections. Select an individual work, then click full view. Click the symbol at lower right to “Download HD Image.” This will bring you to a new screen where you can either right-click (PC) or control-click (Mac) to save.
If you’re on a PC, you can also zoom to a detail in the full view and right-click to save it. If you have a MyMet account, images may be grouped in your account for later reference.
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.
Tired of lugging your laptop from class to class? Try teaching and presenting with your iPad 2 instead! The iPad 2 can connect to a projector through a VGA adapter, just like your laptop. You can open PowerPoint and Keynote presentations in the Keynote app for iPad. Here’s what you’ll need:
Once you’ve navigated to your presentation online (or in Keynote), click to open. If loading from the web, click again on “Open in Keynote.” Keep in mind that some formatting may be lost in translation from PowerPoint to Keynote, or from your laptop to your iPad. See this guide from Apple Support on best practices for creating a presentation on a Mac for use on an iPad. Some quick tips:
You may also use iPad 2 to present media groups or slide shows in LUNA. LUNA mirrors from iPad 2 seamlessly! Contact the VRC if you’d like a demonstration.
Unfortunately, iPad is not yet fully compatible with ARTstor but you can access some ARTstor functionality on iPad with their mobile app.
PLEASE NOTE: Your iPad displays all passwords character-by-character as you enter them. Right now there is no way to change this option. Wait until you have logged in to Chalk, email, LUNA, or other websites before connecting iPad 2 to the projector.
If you have any questions about teaching with iPad 2, or if you’d like to borrow an iPad 2 and adapter to try out the possibilities, please contact the VRC.
Archivists at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are currently processing the papers of Robert L. Van Nice and blogging about the process. Robert L. Van Nice undertook an extensive architectural survey of Hagia Sophia between 1937 and 1985. His collection includes fieldwork materials, architectural drawings, and photographs, and some of these have been digitized and posted to the blog.
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.”