Author: bridgetm

Posted on

Euratlas Periodis: Maps for the History of Europe

Euratlas Periodis is a fantastic web resource that depicts the history of Europe through maps, documenting the political situation at the end of each century from the first to the twentieth. It also functions as a historical gazetteer—when you zoom in, you can see sovereign states and dependent entities as well as political boundaries and important cities.

Membership to the website is free and allows users to download maps and pictures. To become a member, enter your email address on this page—Euratlas Periodis will then email you the log in information.

Posted on

Dunhuang Research Redux

The New Yorker recently ran a story about the Dunhuang Library and the efforts to digitize the large cache of materials originally discovered in a cave outside Dunhuang, in the Gobi Desert in western China in 1900. That original discovery revealed a chamber with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts in 17 languages and 24 scripts. The sheer size of the find is not its only extraordinary feature. Other significant discoveries were revealed, including the oldest known example of a printed book—out dating Gutenberg’s press for sure.

In 1994, the British Library created a team with partners in China, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea to digitize the cache of Dunhuang library materials. Called the International Dunhuang Project, its efforts are two-fold: they want to make the documents accessible to researchers around the world in addition to preserving them. The International Dunhuang Project’s database is freely accessible and provides high quality images of manuscripts ad other materials along with robust cataloging information.

Another fantastic research pertaining to Dunhuang is the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive avaialble in ARTstor. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, a team from Northwestern university photographed (in extremely high resolution) more than 40 of the cave grottos at Dunhuang. The photographs they took were stitched together to create 2-and 3-D representations of the caves that can be viewed using QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) technology.

Via the New Yorker.

Posted on

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Makes Gift of Shunk and Kender Archives

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation recently announced that it is donating nearly 200,000 items from the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Archives to five international institutions. The archival materials include black-and-white prints, color prints, negatives, contact sheets, and color transparencies, and will be distributed to the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of the Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. The Foundation’s gift marks the first time an artist’s foundation has devoted its resources to the work of other artists.

Harry Shunk (1924–2006, born in Germany) and János [Jean] Kender (1937–2009, born in Hungary) made the bulk of their images from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, documenting more than 400 artists in their studios, at openings, and during performances, making this collection an important documentary collection of the modern art and art history. Artists depicted include Roy Lichtenstein, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Man Ray, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol among many others.

After Shunk died in 2006, the Foundation began acquiring the archive by purchase between 2008 and 2012. After acquiring the images, the Foundation “preserved, cataloged, and digitized the images” and made them available in an online collection on their website. You can view the archive’s list of artists to view PDFs of thumbnails that depict that specific artist. For information about using the images in scholarly publications, contact Shunk-Copyright@lichtensteinfoundation.org.

For more information or to check out the collection, visit the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Photography Archives.

Via ArtDaily.

Posted on

Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan

The University of Michigan Library recently announced that it has completed cataloging its entire Islamic Manuscripts Collection, which resulted in the creation if 883 new catalog records and expanding 21 existing descriptions. Now that the project is complete, the entire collection is available in the library’s online catalog, complete with detailed, searchable descriptions.

Additionally, there are digital surrogates for 912 manuscripts from the library’s collection available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. There, users can view the digitized manuscripts in a page viewer or download the entire book or individual pages as PDFs.

The Library created a research guide for the collection, which provides stellar information on the history and scope of the collection, as well as search strategies, policies for viewing manuscripts in the library, and instructions on how to access the digitized manuscripts in HathiTrust.

Image from [al-Ḥizb al-aʻẓam maʻa Dalāʼil al-khayrāt, . Qārī al-Harawī, ʻAlī ibn Sulṭān Muḥammad, d. 1605 or 6.

Posted on

British Library Adds 1 Million Public Domain Images to Flickr

The British Library recently added more than one million images from more than 65,000 public domain books published in the 17–19th centuries to its Flickr Commons page with a CC0 license to encourage users to remix, reuse, and repurpose the images. Included in the million images are geological diagrams, illustrations, comics, illuminations, landscapes, paintings, and more.

The images on Flickr have a set of descriptive tags to help identify the works, including the year of publication, the book record number, and author. Plans for a crowd sourcing project to add more robust descriptive information about the images are in the works for next year.

Check out the British Library Flickr Commons!

Via BoingBoing and the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Blog.

Image taken from page 182 of ‘Onze aarde. Handboek der natuurkundige aardrijkskunde … Met 150 platen en 20 kaartjes in afzonderlijken Atlas’

Posted on

South Side Community Art Center Now Publicly Available in LUNA

Over the summer, the VRC announced that images of artworks held by the South Side Community Art Center were newly added to our LUNA database. We’re now thrilled to announce that the collection has been made publicly available in LUNA, so anyone can access the more than 350 images!

To view the collection, click here. For more information, see our previous post about the SSCAC’s collection.

 

Posted on

Images from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO provides images (up to 1536 pixels) of objects in their collections to users free of charge for educational purposes only. Images can be found on their website under Search the Collection. To place an order for digital images of collection images for teaching and research, request them via email at nebersole@nelson-atkins.org or via their Library’s Contact Us form (be sure to select Visual Resources Library in the Subject/Department drop-down list). The library will send you the requested images via email.

The Nelson-Atkins also contributed 15 scrolling paintings to our Digital Scrolling Paintings website—you can view them here.

Posted on

Imaging the Imagists at the Smart Museum

The Smart Museum of Art received a grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation to greatly expand access and preservation of its collection of Chicago Imagist works on paper. The Smart was able to mount, conserve, and/or photograph 437 works, add 407 new images to their online collections database, expand 51 artwork texts (which can be now viewed in the online catalog records) and interview 3 artists.

The interviews with artists Barbara Rossi, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum are available online through the Smart’s Vimeo channel (and also on an iPad in the Joan and Robert Feitler Gallery for Contemporary Art through August 2014).

To view the newly added images in the Smart’s collections website, the best way to search is by artist name. After completing the grant work, the following Imagist artists are represented on their website:

Roger Brown, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, Karl Wirsum, Don Baum, and the Hairy Who.

If you’re in the area, be sure to visit the current exhibition at the Smart, State of Mind and sister show Bridging California and Chicago which features Chicago Imagist works.

Proudly powered by WordPress