As more information surfaces about the treasure trove of 1,500 looted works found hidden in Munich, the VRC will be following the story closely in hopes that quality images and information about the artworks become available.
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.
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.
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.
The Getty Conservation Institute recently released a new resource called the Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes, which provides a growing collection of in-depth PDF guides of various photographic processes and their variants. The goal of the project is to help researchers and those working with photography collections correctly identify the photographic process of specific prints in their collections so as to make the safest decisions regarding the conservation, exhibition, and storage of the works.
The Atlas currently contains guides to eleven processes, including Albumen, Silver Gelatin, and Photogravure, and combines historic information about the process with information about how artists were using the technique in the darkroom, as well as contemporary conservation science knowledge.
We’ve been covering the news about Artsy since its launch in October 2012 and the announcement earlier this month that it is releasing more than 25,000 images for download. Their next big move is the debut of an iPhone app that takes full advantage of many features in the newly released iOS 7.
The Artsy App is free to downloaded and is updated daily. Currently, it contains more than 50,000 high quality images of artworks that can be searched or browsed across several categories, including subject matter, medium/technique, and style and movement. The app also contains up-to-date information about art world happenings, including exhibitions, art fairs, and auctions.
You can take advantage of the new Parallax feature in iOS 7, which helps Artsy’s feature “View in Room” to engage with artworks as if they were in a gallery setting. Users can also email works of art, save, copy, and print directly from within the app.
We’ve installed the Artsy App on the VRC’s iPad, so feel free to check it out on your own or swing by the VRC to see ours!
Panoramio is a photo-sharing community powered by Google that allows users to tag their photos with geographic information so they can be plotted on a map and searched for by location. You can browse by location, and click on individual images from the map, or search for specific sites and locations.
Some of the images are indeed panoramas, and Panoramio includes both flat and spherical panoramas (the latter provide a 360º of a place). For example, check out this haunting spherical panorama of the Holocaust Monument in Berlin.
This website is useful for studying architecture, cities, and the built environment, and it’s also great for some arm-chair traveling. You can also add your own images to the project.
For more information or to start exploring, check out Panoramio!
In August, ARTstor made several improvements to the ARTstor Digital Library, including:
Export 2,000 images to PowerPoint in a 120-day period with up to 150 images per download. (Was previously 1,000 images in a 120-day period).
Browse through image groups from the Image Group Panel. After opening an Image Group, there will be a tab in the Image Group panel where you can navigate to another image group.
If you have any questions about ARTstor’s new (or old!) features, please do not hesitate to get in contact with the VRC.
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:
The world’s largest film camera is currently at Two North Riverside Plaza, and will be there through Thursday, October 31. The camera was built in order to be used in a project by photographer Dennis Manarchy, from Rockford, IL, called Butterflies & Buffalo: Tales of American Culture.
The camera is 35 feet long, and makes photographs that are larger than life size—more than six feet tall and four feet wide! Manarchy’s project is to make portraits to document at least 50 distinct cultural groups in the United States and plans to travel more than 20,000 miles in order to capture such wide diversity. I’m curious about how they’ll make a darkroom big enough to develop a piece of film that’s bigger than they are!
For more information, visit the Butterflies & Buffalo website, watch the preview for the project on Vimeo, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or swing by the West Loop to see the camera for yourself.
