Public Art at the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago has recently released a new web resource called Public Art on Campus which seeks to catalog, document, and provide contextual and critical information about the works of art on campus. There is an accompanying video which provides an overview of the works on campus. The website allows users to browse works by location, artist, and title and for selected works users can read an artist bibliography and an essay about the work. These selected works also include archival images and documents relevant to the work.

The VRC supports this project by maintaining the UChicago Public Art Collection and Archive in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art, UChicago Arts, and Christine Mehring of the Department of Art History. This dedicated, password-protected collection is accessible to all on-campus users and off-campus users who have a CNetID and password. If you’d like to explore more, the Luna collection contains archival photographs, audio, video, conservation information, and other ephemeral documentation pertaining to the public works on campus.

Simpson Islamic Manuscript Record Archive Online at University of Michigan

The Visual Resources Collections at the University of Michigan just announced that the Simpson Islamic Manuscript Record Archive is available online. They write, “Dr. Simpson served as Curator of Islamic Near Eastern Art at the Freer/Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum, and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (2005).”

The website for the Simpson Islamic Manuscript Record Archive contains more than 500 documentation records and approximately 4,800 images (in a variety of media including prints, color slides, digital images, and microfilm). The Simpson Archive “is organized by repository name and manuscript accession number or shelf mark (for example, “British Library Add. 7622”)” and each record contains robust cataloging information about the manuscript.

This collection is related to the Islamic Art Archives at the University of Michigan, which has more than 900 digitized manuscripts available in HathiTrust.

 

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.

Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan

The University of Michigan Library recently announced that it has completed cataloging its entire Islamic Manuscripts Collection, which resulted in the creation if 883 new catalog records and expanding 21 existing descriptions. Now that the project is complete, the entire collection is available in the library’s online catalog, complete with detailed, searchable descriptions.

Additionally, there are digital surrogates for 912 manuscripts from the library’s collection available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. There, users can view the digitized manuscripts in a page viewer or download the entire book or individual pages as PDFs.

The Library created a research guide for the collection, which provides stellar information on the history and scope of the collection, as well as search strategies, policies for viewing manuscripts in the library, and instructions on how to access the digitized manuscripts in HathiTrust.

Image from [al-Ḥizb al-aʻẓam maʻa Dalāʼil al-khayrāt, . Qārī al-Harawī, ʻAlī ibn Sulṭān Muḥammad, d. 1605 or 6.

Getty Releases New Atlas of Photo Processes

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.

For more information, explore the Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes.

Via ArtDaily

Europeana Open Culture App

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

Mummy Visualization Project in Sweden

Mummies are being imaged with CT scanners and 3D scanning technology to capture the interior as well as the exterior surfaces, colors, and textures of the mummy as well as the cartonnage and sarcophagus. Eventually these images will result in an interactive exhibition. The Guardian describes the project as such:

The Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet) in Stockholm, FARO and Autodesk have teamed up in a mummy visualisation project. The collection will be digitised using the latest 3D reality capture techniques and made available to museum visitors through an interactive exhibition experience.

Via The Guardian.

DOCUMERICA Photos from the 1970s

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.