Category: News

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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

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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.

 

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums News Photography

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.

Categories
Images on the Web News VRC

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’

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

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.

 

Categories
Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

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.

Categories
ARTstor News VRC

ARTstor Mobile’s Flashcard Feature

      

Just in time for finals! You can use image groups in ARTstor to quiz yourself for Image ID tests when you’re using ARTstor on a mobile device. The image groups can be saved in your own personal work folder, or be in an institutional group that your instructor created for you.

After opening the image group, open an image, and click the link below that reads “Switch to Flash Card.” This will allow you to click through the images in the group without providing caption information. In order to bring up the caption information, tap the center of the image. To move back and forth in the image group, use the left and right arrows.

To check out the flashcard feature, navigate to ARTstor Mobile on your device and get studying!

Via ARTstor Blog

 

Categories
News VRC

VRC Has New Adapter to Project from iPad Mini!

No small deal about it: the VRC now has a new adapter to project from an iPad Mini in CWAC classrooms. The HDMI adapter allows for picture and sound projection.

To reserve this adapter or others, please contact the VRC at visualresources@uchicago.edu.

For more information, please see our page on Classroom Technology.

 

Categories
Images on the Web Museums News

The Morgan Begins Digitizing 10,000 Drawings

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York recently announced that it is embarking on a year-long program to digitize its collection of more than 10,000 drawings (including 2,000 versos) dating from the 14th to 21st centuries. The images will be available in a digital library that will provide a robust catalog record with a high resolution image. The digital library will be open to the public, and images will be available for download for use in non-commercial situations including “classroom presentations, dissertations, and educational websites devoted to the fine arts.”

So, get excited about the new digital library, which will hopefully be ready for launch in October 2014. The Morgan has future plans to digitize their print collection, which would be another fantastic resource.

For more information about the project, check out the Morgan’s press release. In the meantime, don’t forget that the Morgan has other valuable online resources available now, including Collection Highlights, Online Exhibitions, and Music Manuscripts.

Via ArtDaily