Categories
Images on the Web News

WorldImages Back Online with New Content

The WorldImages database from California State University contains more than 100,000 images from around the globe. Users can search or browse the collection, and for convenience, the images are organized into more than 900 portfolios based on themes, places, and time periods. New content including images from the Balkans and Greece was recently added.

Additionally, he images have embedded metadata that can be viewed in programs such as Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, Aperture, iPhoto, and Picasa or your Mac finder window or Windows file properties.

For more information and to check out the collection, visit WorldImages. And if you have questions about finding and using embedded metadata, please get in touch with the VRC!

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary

Stanford and the BNF Release 14,000 Images of the French Revolution

Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have partnered on the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collection of more than 14,000 high-resolution images. The archive has two areas of content, including Images, which contains about 12,000 individual images of prints, illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects. The section on Parliamentary Archives contains primary source documents arranged chronologically. Users can browse by date or subject, and search both the Images and Parliamentary Archives sections at once or individually. The project also contains an excellent timeline of the Revolution.

For more information, check out the French Revolution Digital Archive!

Via Hyperallergic

Categories
ARTstor News

ARTstor Offering Webinars in February

ARTstor is hosting some online training webinars during February to cover a variety of general topics as well as subject-specific content. The “What Can You Do With ARTstor?” session on February 7 at 12pm EST will cover finding, managing, and sharing content in image groups, PowerPoint presentations, and work folders among other things.

For more information or to register for a webinar, check out ARTstor’s Online Training schedule.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Islamic News

Archnet Releases New Website

MIT’s Archnet, a collaboration between the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT Libraries, “is a portal to rich and unique scholarly resources featuring thousands of sites, publications, images, and more focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world.” The website has recently been remained and restructured since its launch ten years ago.

The website features a timeline, a wide variety of digital collections and research materials, an advanced search, and selected syllabi pertaining to the study of Islamic Art, Architecture, and Culture.

To explore for yourself, check out Archnet!

 

Categories
Museums News

Getty Launches Free Virtual Library with 250 Titles

The Getty just launched its Virtual Library, the newest project in their Open Content Program. The Virtual Library makes more than 250 publications freely available to read online or to download a PDF in its entirety. The books are from the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, and include exhibition catalogs, translations, and journals among others.

Users can browse the site by publishing program, type, subject, or series, and there are also title, author, and keyword searches. The record for each title in the Virtual Library also includes a WorldCat link so users may find the title in a local library or request it through ILL.

For more information or to explore the collection, check out the Getty’s Virtual Library!

Via The Getty Iris and ArtDaily.

Categories
Images on the Web

Wellcome Library Releases High-Resolution Images Free of Charge

From the Wellcome Library:

We are delighted to announce that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images.

Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge.

The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya.

The earliest item is an Egyptian prescription on papyrus, and treasures include exquisite medieval illuminated manuscripts and anatomical drawings, from delicate 16th century fugitive sheets, whose hinged paper flaps reveal hidden viscera to Paolo Mascagni’s vibrantly coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso.

Other treasures include a beautiful Persian horoscope for the 15th-century prince Iskandar, sharply sketched satires by Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, as well as photography from  Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion. John Thomson’s remarkable nineteenth century portraits from his travels in China can be downloaded, as well a newly added series of photographs of hysteric and epileptic patients at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital.

Above Image: Wellcome Library, London. Horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror.

Categories
News Photography

Hundreds of Images of Historic London Published for First Time

The archives manager at Bishopsgate Institute recently discovered boxes containing more than 3,000 slides depicting London’s landmarks including churches, statues, buildings, and social scenes from the Victorian period to the early 20th century.

In 2007, a project to digitize the images launched, some of which can be seen here. More than 600 images were digitized, and in October 2013 were published in a book called The Gentle Author’s London Album.

For more information, visit the Spitalfield’s page on the album. To view a sampling of images, visit the ITV News article about the project.

Image: Traffic on Tower Bridge, 1905 Credit: Bishopsgate Institute

Categories
VRC

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.

Categories
East Asian Innovative Technology News

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.

Categories
Ancient Innovative Technology News

Roman Catacombs in Google Street View

Google Street View recently added two Roman catacombs to its repertoire—the Catacomb of Priscilla and the Dino Companion. The Catacomb of Priscilla was used for Christian burials in the second through fourth centuries, and contains wall paintings of saints and other symbols.