Google recently launched its Art Project, a collaborative venture with art museums from around the world. The project aims to provide both virtual tours of museum galleries using Google’s street-view technology as well as high-resolution photography of artworks, allowing for remarkable zoom capability. The site also encourages visitors to sign in and create collections of favorites to share with friends.
For more information, visit the Art Project’s FAQ page.
We recently updated the VRC’s Other Art Resources Online page with links to several Japanese image resources online. These include a link to the Tokyo National Museum’s website, with a version in English organized by type, region, and what is currently on display at the museum.
Other new links include: Japanese cultural properties, Japanese national treasures in public museums, Kyoto National Museum’s collections database, and Japanese modern art in Japanese public museums.
Questions, or suggestions of other websites to add to the list? Please contact the VRC.
The British Library offers a very high-quality scan of the Lindisfarne Gospels online. Viewers can click and hold the mouse while moving the cursor to the left to “turn” each page. Three buttons at bottom right allow for text description, audio description, and magnification of each page.
A version for dial-up users is also available.
A recent Princeton panel discussion summary sheds some light on current topics in arts libraries, including the ways access and preservation change in the digital world. Of note: an exploration of how new media artworks are captured and collected; a reflection on the myriad ways architects digitally design buildings (and the loss of information that sometimes results); and the copyright complexities of licensed, streaming musical performances.
Via IT’s Academic.
With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France lets you explore parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions: space, time, and narrative.
Via Geospatial Technologies in Education.
ARTstor is now available to registered users on mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad equipped with Safari 4+. ARTstor Mobile features include keyword search, image group access, flashcard view, and collection browse. For more information about ARTstor Mobile, click here and be sure to register for ARTstor.
Via Open Culture:
This past week, an Italian web site (Haltadefinizione) placed online six works from the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence, all in super high resolution. Each image is packed with close to 28 billion pixels, a resolution 3,000 times greater than your normal digital photo. And this gives art connoisseurs everywhere the ability to zoom in and explore these paintings in exquisitely fine detail – to see strokes and details not normally seen even by visitors to the Uffizi.
These digital reproductions will be available online for free until January 29, 2011.
Today NPR’s The Picture Show featured photographs taken by Harold Eugene Edgerton during the 1950s which captured the earliest moments of atomic explosions. As the NPR article explains:
After the war, EG & G, Inc. (Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier Inc.) developed the rapatronic camera for the Atomic Energy Commission to record — specifically, in one take only — the beginning of nuclear explosions… The dangers of shockwaves and radiation required the camera to be placed 7 miles from the detonation site on a tower some 75 feet in the air. Exposure time was one-hundred-millionth of a second. The exposure time was so small that no conventional mechanical shutter could be used. A magnetic field was created around two polarized lenses that were rotated, permitting light to pass through an optical system.
An example of the rapatronic camera is pictured above. To see examples from the series of atomic bomb photographs by Edgerton, visit NPR’s article.
The British Museum offers free online delivery of images in the collection for print non-commercial use. Register for free; requests are delivered as jpeg attachments, and are limited to 100 per month. This service is available for print use (non-commercial publication, less than 4,000 copies) only, but all images from their website are available for educational non-commercial use (including projection in the classroom).
Please read full terms of use.
Between 1909 and 1912, “photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.”
These images are now owned by the Library of Congress, which acquired the glass plates in 1948. Digital reproductions are available online.
Via Boston.com’s Big Picture photography blog.