Author: arybin

Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Islamic

Chester Beatty Library Seals Project

The Chester Beatty Library Seals Project:

is an online, interactive database of seal impressions found in Islamic Manuscripts… as a visitor to the site, you are invited to participate in deciphering the seals, identifying the individuals or institutions named, and adding information such as other sources of the same seal impression or other seals that name the same individual or institution.

As there is currently no convenient means by which to find or share information on seal impressions, we hope that this database will be a useful resource for anyone working on Islamic manuscripts.

A user guide is available here. Individual seals are available for download as low-resolution files for teaching or research. Seal records are also linked to the full manuscript so entire folios may be easily viewed.

Categories
News VRC

VRC Adds Keurig Recycling

The VRC is now a participant in the Grounds to Grow On program, collecting used Keurig cups for composting and recycling.

After making coffee in the VRC, place used K-Cups in the black recycling box (located on the lowest shelf next to the coffee station). Let us know if you have questions. Happy caffeinating!

Categories
Images on the Web Museums

National Gallery of Art Launches NGA Images

Designed by Gallery experts to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration, NGA Images features more than 20,000 open access digital images, up to 3,000 pixels each, available free of charge for download and use. The resource is easily accessible through the Gallery’s website, and a standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts.

With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are now available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images.

To read more about the NGA Images Open Access policy, click here. Images downloaded from the site also include basic embedded metadata with descriptive information about the artwork. Registration is not required for presentation-sized downloads, and images may be downloaded in groups to save time. Users of NGA Images may wish to sign up for accounts in order access advanced site features, including use of lightboxes (groups of images) for saving and sharing. Registration is also required for reproduction-ready downloads. See some of the most frequently requested images here.

 

Categories
ARTstor Images by Subscription Luna

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!

 

 

Categories
Copyright Images on the Web Medieval

New Collections from the Index of Christian Art

Three new online image resources from the Index of Christian Art are now available. The first two listed below provide high resolution images for scholarly publications upon request, free of charge.

Romanesque Art Collection

The first of these is a database of some six thousand images of medieval (mainly Romanesque) art taken by a Swiss couple who wish to remain anonymous. The collection of digitized slides covers Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and The Netherlands, and includes many lesser-known sites as well as the more familiar. Most of the images are of sculpture, architecture, or wall paintings. The collection opens with frescoes from the Chapel of Saint Leonard in Naunders, Austria and closes with Amsoldingen Church in Switzerland.

The Lois Drewer Database

When she died some five months ago Lois Drewer left the Index of Christian Art a large and unsorted collection of several thousand slides covering many countries she visited throughout her lifetime. Her wide interest in art and architecture is reflected in this collection — not surprisingly called The Lois Drewer Database — which spans landscape and garden design, to archaeological sites in the Near East, to Romanesque and Gothic architecture, to a considerable focus on Renaissance architecture. Her travels brought her to Austria, Crete, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Libya, the Netherlands, Spain, Syria, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Gabriel Millet Collection

The third resource, and certainly the most ambitious of the three, is the first installment of images from a collaborative venture the Index entered into with the Bibliothèque Gabriel Millet in the Sorbonne, Paris. This is to catalogue the entire archive of Byzantine art that was first started in 1903. As it presently stands, the database contains nearly all of the slides (approximately 15,000) in the archive and these provide an unrivalled visual record of Byzantine art, particularly manuscripts, but with wall paintings and other media included as well.

Via the International Center of Medieval Art newsletter.

Categories
East Asian Images on the Web

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.

 

Categories
Photography

Fisheye, Macro, Wide Angle, and Telephoto Lenses for Cell Phones

Photojojo is now selling magnetic fisheye, macro/wide angle, and telephoto lenses for cell phones. These lenses attach via a small adhesive magnetic ring and work with both the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 (even leaving room for the flash). The lenses should also work with other camera-equipped cell phones, including the Android. All three lenses sell together for $49.00.

 

Categories
Moving Images Museums Renaissance - Baroque

“Leonardo Live” at the Music Box Theatre

Leonardo Live documents the exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,” on view and sold out at the U.K. National Gallery. The film will be shown at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, opening on March 14th at 7pm.

After limited screenings in the UK in November 2011, an expanded presentation of LEONARDO LIVE featuring bonus content will be available at movie theaters around the world, in limited screenings only. Captured live on the eve of the exhibition opening in London this fall, LEONARDO LIVE will provide a high-definition walk-through of the landmark exhibition, in-depth commentary about featured pieces in the exhibit and extra content.

To buy advance tickets or to see a preview, click here.

Categories
Innovative Technology

Sound-Activated “Seeing” for the Blind

Israeli scientists have developed a “sensory substitution device” (SSD) that they say lets congenitally blind people “see” for the first time ever.

The device… features a tiny computerized video camera that transforms light into so-called “soundscapes”–specific tones that the wearer interprets using his/her sense of hearing.

Read more about the device here. Via Huffington Post.

Categories
Images on the Web Medieval

Visual Archive of Gothic Architecture and Sculpture in Ireland

Gothic Past is an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture. It is part of a research project in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, which is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). The site showcases images from three significant collections of image archives housed in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College. They include the Stalley Collection and the Rae Collection of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture: photographic images that were created and collected from the 1930s to the present day. A third archive contains the O’Donovan collection of Irish Gothic moulding profiles.

Registered users can group and save images for later reference, and can use these groups as presentation tools. In the future, users will be able to submit their own images for inclusion.