Hey, new graduate students! If you were previously studying at another institution and would like to transfer your former ARTstor account, please contact ARTstor User Services at userservices@artstor.org. You do not need to create a new account.
Please do not hesitate to contact the VRC if you encounter any difficulties. For more information, please see ARTstor FAQs.
This summer, the Europeana digital library launched its first app, Open Culture, which includes a selection of 350,000 images from its online collection of cultural objects from Europe’s institutions. The app is organizied around five curated themes, including Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature, and Images of the Past.
Users can perform keyword searches in the app, or browse through a visual wall of image thumbnails. You can also save favorites, add comments, and share object records on Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps best of all: the images included in the Europeana Open Culture app are either in the public domain or openly licensed, so they may be used for any publishing purpose.
For more information, stop by the VRC to explore Open Culture on our iPad, or visit the App Store.
Via Europeana Blog
The Visual Resources Center will be closed from Friday, August 30th through Monday, September 2nd in observance of Labor Day.
We will reopen for regular hours on Tuesday, September 3rd. Enjoy your weekend and see you next week!
Image information: Labor Day Weekend Brings the Annual Garfield County Fair Parade, 09/1973, courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Flickr.
Sixty Inches From Center is a not-for-profit organization that documents and engages visual arts in Chicago, and they feature a lot of the documentary material they capture and create on their website, the Chicago Arts Archive.
In addition to providing a lot of news and blog content about upcoming arts events in Chicago, they also include “video, audio, photography, editorial essays, and interviews to document artists and arts events that exist outside of the city’s mainstream cultural institutions.”
For more information, check out the Chicago Arts Archive by Sixty Inches From Center.
The Getty Open Content Program, recently launched, makes high-resolution images of more than 4,600 public domain artworks in the Getty’s collection publicly available to download on the Getty’s website.
In order to download the image file, the website asks you to identify what type of user you are (i.e., an individual or a non-for-profit company) and what your intended use is: personal, publication, non-commercial, or commercial. If you are going to publish the image you will have to provide publication information, but for all other uses, no other information is necessary to access the file and then you are free to use, modify, or publish it for any purpose.
The Getty will continue to increase the number of images available, drawing on works that are in the public domain in the museum’s collection as well as their special collections. They also have plans on expanding the program to include the Getty Vocabularies and other professional resources.
To view all images in the Getty Open Content Program, click here. For more information on the program, visit this blog post by James Cuno or read the FAQ.
Via the Getty Iris.
Image:Eugène Atget. Fête du Trône, 1923. J. Paul Getty Museum, 90.XM.124.5.
In the early 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency hired more than 70 freelance photographers to take pictures of life in the United States as it intersected with the environment for the Project DOCUMERICA (1971–77). The National Archives has digitized more than 15,000 images from the project, and they are available online via NARA’s online catalog or though a Flickr collection that is much easier to browse.
You can browse by image topic, location, or photographer—and that’s where things start to get really interesting. Photographers hired for the project include Danny Lyon (AB ’63) and photojournalist John H. White (born 1945) who worked for the Chicago Defender and was recently laid off from the Chicago Sun Times along with the rest of their staff photographers.
Because the project was funded by the federal government, there are no copyright restrictions on the images, and users can download 300 dpi original size files from the Flickr collection. For more information and to explore the collection, visit Flickr and the National Archives.
Via Peta Pixel
Image: Danny Lyon. Albuquerque Speedway Park, One of Three Stock Car Race Tracks in Albuquerque, May 1972. 412-DA-2825. Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD, 20740-6001.
ARTstor is performing temporary scheduled maintenance tomorrow morning between 6 am and 9 am EST. For those in Chicago, that means the ARTstor Digital Library will be temporarily suspended between 5 am and 8 am CST.
Please let us know if you have any problems!
In June 2013, the Council of Library and Information Resources in conjunction with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation published the report Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access. The report, written by Kristin Kelly, examined the policies, websites, and procedures of 11 large museums to get determine the state of open access to images.
The report has been added to our web page about Copyright Resources for Academic Publishing, which provides a list of general guides and resources as well as lists repositories that have copyright-free or copyright-lenient policies towards letting users download high quality image files of works of art. We try to keep this web page up-to-date, so if you’re aware of any collections that should be included, please don’t hesitate to let us know!
The eMuseum Network Digital Collections Search contains digital images from the catalogs of many museums, libraries, cultural institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the International Center of Photography, the MFA Boston, MoMA, and more. Best of all the collection of institutions is constantly growing, and there is currently more than 1 million objects available through the search portal.
For more information, check out eMuseum.
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:
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
