Category: Images on the Web

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums

Penn Museum’s Digital Resources for Archaeology and Anthropology

The Penn Museum in Philadelphia, the University of Pennslyvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, recently launched two new digital endeavors for researchers.

The newly revamped Collections Database includes more than 690,000 objects and more than 95,000 images. The database records are robust, with links to related objects and bibliographic citations of where the image has been published.

The Penn Museum also allows users to download data files of its object records under a Creative Commons license. You can download datasets on all objects or by cultural group, including African, American, Asian, Egyptian, European, Historic, Mediterranean, Near Eastern, and Oceanian. The datasets include physical information, its provenance, and materialiaty but not images of the objects and the objects’ publication and exhibition histories.

The Research Map and Timeline provides interactive documentation and information about the museum’s research expeditions and projects since the 1880s. Users can browse projects geographically or chronologically, and the website provides a record of the dates, researchers, and time period studied as well as a brief description of the work done and key discoveries.

Via ArtDaily

Categories
Architecture Images on the Web Innovative Technology

NYT’s ‘Short History of the Highrise’

People have been living in vertical housing structures for 2,500 years, and the New York Times recently created an interactive documentary called ‘A Short History of the Highrise‘ in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada to explore the history of high-rises and the related social, political, and material issues.

The film plays chronologically to discuss three phases of vertical communal living in a global context: Mud, Concrete, and Glass. At any time, you can mouse “down” in order to explore more in-depth about whatever topic is currently on the screen and when you’re done, you can go right back into the film where you left off. The documentary is image-rich, with oil paintings and historic photographs included throughout. Clicking on an image also includes robust cataloging information.

Although the documentary is “short,” it’s narrations reference major developments in 20th century architecture, especially public housing and urban sprawl.

Check out the Short History of the Highrise by the New York Times.

Categories
Images on the Web News

VADS: The Online Resource for Visual Arts

VADS (from The University for the Creative Arts in England) is an incredible collection of more than 120,000 images of art and design from cultural institutions across the UK, including universities, libraries, museums, and archives.

Collections included are the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection (which we previously blogged about!), the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, Oxford Portraits from the University of Oxford, Paper Patterns from the London College of Fashion, and Posters of Conflict from the Imperial War Museum.

Recently, 177 images from the Glasgow School of Art’s student publication called The Magazine (1893–86) have been digitized and made available via VADS.

For more information, check out The Magazine collection or read the press release about it.

Image: Agnes Raeburn, The Magazine, April 1894, cover. Copyright Glasgow School of Art.

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary

Princeton’s Campus Art Website

Princeton University holds a stellar collection of modern sculpture by artists such as Alexander Calder, Frank Gehry, Sol LeWitt, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, and Louis Comfort Tiffany to name only a few. These works are installed on Princeton’s campus, and the Princeton University Art Museum recently launched a new mobile website called Campus Art to facilitate users who wish to explore their outdoor works in situ.

The website explains the goal of the web project:

Campus Art at Princeton enhances the educational and visceral experience of art and sculpture on campus for students, the local community, and visitors alike. Visitors can hear the voices of Museum curators and experts involved behind the scenes, including fabricators, installers, conservators, and photographers. For some of the works, architects and historians contextualize the art in relation to surrounding architecture and University history. Users can browse a light box of images or take walking tours using an interactive map divided into five campus neighborhoods. As new works are installed and new perspectives added, the site will continue to evolve.

The website allows users to browse through thumbnails of installation photography, by artist name, or by “neighborhood” (the five different geographic areas of Princeton’s campus). The record for each artwork in the collection includes robust data about the work, some historical context, a map of its location, and an audio file of a curator narrating something significant about the work.

For more information, explore Princeton’s Campus Art project.

Via ArtDaily

Categories
Images on the Web News

The Getty Adds Special Collections Materials to Open Content Program

In mid-October, the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections announced that it has added 5,400 artwork images from special collections to the Open Content Program, which brings the total number of images that are freely available without copyright restrictions to more than 10,000.

The newly added content includes “artist’ sketchbooks, drawings and watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks, and early photographs of the Middle East and Asia.” For example, there are more than thirty early photographs from Mayan archaeological sites.

For more information, check out our previous blog post on the Getty’s Open Content Program, or explore the 10,000 public domain images here!

Via The Getty Iris

Image: [Nunnery complex (Uxmal, Mexico): detail of facade frieze], 1882, GRI Digital Collections, 94-F125.

Categories
American Images on the Web

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Joins Google Art Project

160 objects from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation‘s collections are now available in the Google Art Project, and include paintings, furniture, silver, Chinese export porcelain, as well as ceramics, prints, maps, textiles, and numismatics.

For more information, check out the Colonial Williamsburg collection in Google Art!

Categories
Images on the Web Renaissance - Baroque VRC

Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590

Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590 is a resource from UNC Libraries that presents the digitized engravings Theodore De Bry (1528–98) illustrated for A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. These hand-colored engravings were based on the watercolors of John White, who became part of the first British colony in North America, which was established off the coast of what is now North Carolina in 1585. Although the colonists were only there for about a year, White painted the environment and people of North America.

In 1588, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was published, containing stories and descriptions about the new land. De Bry worked directly from John White’s watercolors to create 27 engravings for the illustrated edition to create what would be the first published images of Native Americans. However, the digital collection notes:

While the De Bry engravings shown on this site represent the earliest published images of Native Americans, viewers should be careful not to interpret these as accurate depictions of the inhabitants of North Carolina in the late sixteenth century. The images shown here are twice removed from John White’s original watercolors. In the engravings created by Theodore De Bry, there are many subtle but significant changes from White’s originals: the facial structure of most of the people has been altered, resulting in portraits that look more like Europeans; the musculature on most of the people is much more defined in the De Bry engravings; and the poses of many of the subjects seem to reflect classical statuary. The colorist for this volume has contributed to the distortion of the original images by adding a pale skin tone and blonde hair to some of the people and decorating much of the vegetation in colors that are unlike anything that occurs naturally in this part of the world.

For more information and to explore the digital collection, visit Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590.

 

Categories
ARTstor Images by Subscription Images on the Web News

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.

Categories
Images on the Web Museums VRC

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts’ New eMuseum Collection

In July, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts launched a new digital collections website in eMuseum, which allows users to view more than 4,000 of the museum’s works online. The museum focuses on “American painting, sculpture, and ceramics; American and European works on paper (16th century and later); and photography.”

To explore the KIA’s 4,200 works on the web, search or browse their Collections website. The website allows users to view an enlarged version of the work and provides basic catalog records.

For more information on eMuseum, visit our previous blog post on the topic, or conduct a federated search on the collections of more than 600 cultural institutions that host their collections in Gallery Systems’ eMuseum software.

Via ArtDaily

Categories
Images on the Web News

Image and Research Resources Impacted by the Government Shutdown

Photograph of Socks the Cat Standing on the Press Podium in the Press Room at the White House: 12/05/1993
Photograph of Socks the Cat Standing on the Press Podium in the Press Room at the White House: 12/05/1993, courtesy U.S. National Archives Flickr Photostream

Below please find a partial list of image and online research resources that are impacted by this week’s federal government shutdown. We will continue to add to this list as more information is available.

Resources currently offline:

Library of Congress, including Prints & Photographs Catalog, Subject Authority Files, and the American Memory Project

NASA, including the NASA image exchange

Institute of Education Sciences

National Park Service

Census Bureau

The following sites are currently still available online, though they may not be updated during the shutdown:

Smithsonian Institution, including the Collections Search Center at http://collections.si.edu/search/

National Gallery of Art

National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health

Online Public Access (formerly known as ARC) for the National Archives at http://www.archives.gov/research/search/

US Army Corps of Engineers

Bureau of Labor Statistics

List courtesy of Heather Cleary, Otis College of Art and Design via the Visual Resources Association listserv.