New Module in Archivision Collection

The Visual Resources Center is very pleased to offer over 6,000 new images of architecture and outdoor sculpture loaded overnight to the Archivision Collection. Archivision is a subscription-based collection of almost 78,000 high-resolution, high-quality images of architecture, urban design, gardens, and outdoor sculpture from around the world and all time periods. The collection is curated by Scott Gilchrist, a trained architect and professional photographer.

The latest upload, Module 10, contains a wealth of images of architecture in the United States, including modern and contemporary works in California and the desert southwest. There is also early Modernist buildings from the Netherlands, important buildings in India, campuses of both the Cranbrook Academy and Yale University, topographic views of many US cities, and even images from Yellowstone National Park.

All images are cleared for educational use and publication rights may be obtained at contact@archivision.com.

New Image Group Download Feature in ARTstor

Great news!

You can now download groups of images from ARTstor at the same time as a zip file. Previously, you had to download images individually.

To use the new feature, make sure the images you want to download are saved as an image group. (pro tip: If you want to save everything on a page, go to Organize > Select all images on page > Organize > Save selected images to > New or Existing image group.) Open the image group, and then click on the icon of a file folder with a downwards pointing arrow on it. After accepting ARTstor’s terms and conditions, a zipped folder with image and data files will download.

For a video tutorial of how to use the new service, check out ARTstor’s YouTube video on Image Group Download.

AFRICOBRA in Chicago (and in LUNA)

Tomorrow, the Philosophy show of the three-part AFRICOBRA in Chicago exhibition opens at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. AFRICOBRA in Chicago presents three current and upcoming shows in Chicago take a deserved look at the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AFRICOBRA), which was founded in 1968 by a group of Chicago artists. The three parts of the AFRICOBRA in Chicago exhibition are as follows:

  • Prologue, South Side Community Art Center, May 10–July 7, 2013 (curated by UChicago students)
  • Philosophy, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, June 28–August 7, 2013 (curated by Rebecca Zorach)
  • Art and Impact, DuSable Museum, July 26–September 29, 2013

Many works from the exhibitions are from the collection of the South Side Community Art Center. The VRC is proud to include over 350 images from the SSCAC publicly in our online LUNA database.

For more information about the exhibits, visit the AFRICOBRA in Chicago website.

Via UChicago News

Round-Up of Fashion and Textile Resources

The Museum at FIT has a comprehensive list of Costume and Textile Collections Online, with annotations about what you’ll expect to find in the database and other information about each particular collection. Their list includes collections from all over the world and highlights some of the best images of textiles and garments online.

In addition to these websites, there are several other collections and databases that could be useful for researching fashion, textile, and costume:

In LUNA:

In ARTstor:

At the University of Chicago Library

Image credit: Elsa Schiaparelli. Doll, Fashion (Evening Ensemble), 1949. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Syndicat de la Couture de Paris; Photographed by Lolly Koon. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cinema Image Gallery Database Trial

The University of Chicago now has trial access to Cinema Image Gallery, an EBSCO database featuring pictures, posters, video clips, film stills and other materials from the world of moving images, starting in the late 19th century and continuing to present day.

Cinema Image Gallery presents the history of moviemaking, as well as up-to-the-minute content from recent releases, and an extensive collection of television stills.

Content Includes:

  • More than 217,000 superior-quality images
  • A treasure trove of more than 6,200 posters and lobby cards used to promote movies
  • Links to 160 full movies, and to biographical materials about notable figures in the industry
  • Portrait photography and biographies of the stars of film and television
  • Database-specific search parameters developed specifically for this resource—Title, Director, Actor Names, Genre, Awards (Academy Award, Cannes Film Festival, Screen Actors Guild)—to ensure accuracy and speed in locating relevant material

Access the trial on-campus here. Let us know what you think in the comments!

New ARTstor Collections and Updates

ARTstor has recently added and expanded some exciting collections in the digital library:

ARTstor has collaborated with George Eastman House to share more than 1,000 additional photographs in the Digital Library. This addition includes 600 images by Lewis Hines along with works by pivotal figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Southworth & Hawes, and Walker Evans.

ARTstor has released more than 4,000 additional images from the Peabody Museum of Natural History’s permanent collection and photographic archives in the Digital Library. The Museum is contributing approximately 10,000 images from its archival collections, a majority of which consist of archaeological and ethnographic objects from throughout the Caribbean, including Antigua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic and other islands, as well as northern South America.

The entire collection of nearly 6,000 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brooklyn Museum Costumes is now available in the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program. In addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, IAP’s founding partner, ARTstor is pleased to announce that seven important institutions are participating, including: The Getty Research Institute, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton University Art Museum, Northwestern University Library, and University of California, Irvine, and Bryn Mawr College.

ARTstor and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have released more than 750 images of major artworks from the permanent collection in the Digital Library. The images document the Guggenheim Museum’s superb holdings in modern and contemporary art by such significant artists as Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Paul Klee, Robert Mapplethorpe, Claes Oldenburg, Cindy Sherman, and Vincent van Gogh, among many others.

For more information about ARTstor collections or for an ARTstor tutorial, please contact the VRC.

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!

 

 

New Image and Media Database Trials

University of Chicago users now have trial access to the Paley Center for Media iCollection until February 28th. Please contact us for login information. The iCollection includes 15,000+ programs from the Paley Center’s collection. They are adding hundreds of new radio and television programs and advertisements each week as the collection is digitized.

The Prometheus Image Archive is also available to University of Chicago users on a trial basis until March 7th. See “Campus Login” at left and accept the Terms of Use for access.

prometheus is a digital image archive for Art and Cultural Sciences. prometheus allows for the convenient search for images on a common user interface within different image archives, variable databases from institutes, research facilities and museums.

Please send feedback about these databases to the Visual Resources Center or to Nancy Spiegel, Bibliographer for Art and Cinema at Regenstein Library.