We in the Visual Media Center are up to our elbows in clay (or images of it) this fall. In recent weeks, we’ve added 139 new images to DUVAGA to support ceramics studio courses, and we’re presently processing an additional 182 images, so keep an eye out for more!
The area of contemporary ceramics is one that hasn’t been adequately covered by most visual resources collections in the past. That’s changing, thanks to initiative taken by Margo Ballantyne, Visual Resources Curator, and Ted Vogel, Assistant Professor and Program Head in Ceramics at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR! Margo and Ted, with their staff and funding from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)’s Instructional Innovation Fund, have worked to create a new resource, accessCeramics, which provides access to images of and information about contemporary ceramic works.
On the accessCeramics site, you can browse over 400 images (so far) by artist as well as by glazing/surface treatment, materials used, temperature used, and technique (wow!!). Ceramic artists themselves submit their work for inclusion on the site, and submissions are juried by a curatorial board before they are added. Only the person who owns the rights to the works depicted can add images, and most images are available for use with proper attribution. The image resolutions are reasonable for PowerPoint presentations, or for addition to DUVAGA as personal images. Alternatively, you can always just visit the website and use the Firefox plugin PicLens (mentioned on this blog previously) to view the images, or talk to me about tracking down similar images to add to DUVAGA.
I love YouTube, the site where virtually anyone can post videos of virtually anything, as much as the next person, but I never thought I’d be using it for learning or for work. To me, it wasn’t much more than a place to watch really fun stuff people sent me in e-mail forwards, like this or this. Slowly but surely, I’ve been reconsidering my stance on YouTube. There’s actually a ton of useful material if you’re willing to dig a little bit to find it.
For example, a few months ago I found a portion of one of my all-time favorite works, The Way Things Go by Fischli and Weiss:
A few weeks ago, The Observer published a list of the “Top 50 Arts Videos on YouTube,” which covers art, literature, and music, and includes things like this interview with Francis Bacon:
YouTube just keeps proving itself more useful. Earlier in the quarter Sarah showed me some great clips of early 90s all-girl punk bands she was using for her class. Over the summer, I managed to find a video Dan mentioned, Claude Lelouch’s 1976 C’était un Rendezvous (admittedly of rather poor quality, but available nonetheless).
My visual resources colleagues at the Architecture school at UT-Austin have found yet another use for YouTube. They’ve produced several videos to market their services and offer users tips on things like creating PowerPoint presentations.
Videos from YouTube, Google Video, and other sites can be incorporated into your DUVAGA presentations by simply copying the “embed code” (shown below) from the video webpage into DUVAGA. As long as the video remains on YouTube or Google Video, it will remain in your gallery.
We just uploaded 557 more purchased images to DUVAGA yesterday, and I think this set helps us fill a gap in modern and contemporary art and design! The new images, licensed through Davis Art Images, include sets from the PBS series Art:21, as well as some great images of 20th century design. A couple of my favorites from this set include:
Images of Krzysztof Wodiczko projections…
…a few from Cai Guo Qiang…
…and some great examples of modern design, like this Eero Aarnio chair
As always, I’ve created a gallery (“Davis Art Images, 9/8/08 Upload”) of these recently uploaded images, which faculty can now find at the top of the “instructor galleries” page. Students can find these images through the Art History search page — all of them have been cataloged with “Visual Media Director” as the instructor.
Again, please let me know about any metadata discrepencies, or if you have trouble finding anything! Enjoy!
New today! 2,420 new images from Scholars Resource, mostly of medieval architecture, with a handful of Mesoamerican and Incan images mixed in. I divided this order into five separate galleries for easier browsing, and you can find them all in the “Instructor Galleries” tab on the Search page, under my name.
We’re busy in the Visual Media Center’s temporary headquarters (a.k.a. Myhren Gallery) finishing up image orders for fall quarter, including:
a lot of Japanese prints
some photos of a certain professor’s Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
and a smattering of images for a couple of first year seminars, “Bad Girls, Riot Grrrls and Misbehaving Women” and “Art of Death.”
Meanwhile, our usual home is being remodeled to make way for the eMAD grad students, but we’re hoping to move back in later this week or early next week. There’s more construction in room 119, too, as the classroom equipment is being upgraded to something sleeker and more reliable. Trainings on the new equipment and the new DUVAGA projection tool are available. I’m also available to come to your classes and show your students how they can use DUVAGA for presentations, research, and studying — please get in touch with me if you’re interested!
I just finished uploading 1,621 Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque images from Saskia this morning! These have been hanging out in the office for a while now, but with Alex’s programming expertise and Diane’s metadata expertise, we’ve been able to load them all onto DUVAGA smoothly. You can access the newest images via my shared Instructor Gallery, “Saskia Images, 7/31/08 Upload.” If you have questions, requests, or comments, or if you spot metadata discrepancies, please let me know.
Joseph has been busy completely rebuilding the application we use to view DUVAGA images on the dual projection systems in rooms 118 and 119, and the results are quite nice. Retaining all of the functionality of the previous application, Joseph has redesigned the interface and made several enhancements. Here’s what you’ll see when you use the new classroom application:
It looks similar, but here are some of the new features:
The metadata display no longer obstructs the projected image, instead appearing across the top of the screen.
Only artist, title, and date information will be projected to students, but instructors will have access to the full object record.
The zoom tool is easier to control.
You can pan across an image you’ve zoomed in on by dragging the image around the display area.
DUVAGA video and audio clips can be played through one projector, while an image is shown on the other.
You can now open a simple web browser from the software without exiting the application and turning mirroring on.
If you have added a web address to any gallery item, you can link to that site directly.
Upon logging in, you have the option to view ALL of your galleries, or only those galleries connected to the current term.
This application can be used on ANY computer that is connected to more than one display. So if you’re taking your laptop to a conference, you can use the application so that you can see all of the metadata, etc., but your colleagues only see the image. The software detects how many displays there are,and provides you with the right number of windows.
The application will work on any operating system, including Microsoft, Mac, and Linux.
I’ll be providing one-on-one training sessions throughout August and early September, and I highly recommend you make an appointment for one to see the new tool and refresh yourself on the classroom technology.
Next time you conduct a search in DUVAGA, you’ll have a new option for viewing your search results. Alex has incorporated an application called PicLens into the DUVAGA system. If you download the software (there’s also a link on the DUVAGA website), here’s what you’ll be able to do:
1.) Perform any search in DUVAGA, and click “PicLens Slideshow” from the results page (click the image above to make it bigger).
2.) If PicLens has been installed correctly, you should see something like the image above. There’s a scroll tool at the bottom of the page that will allow you to move through all of the search results very quickly.
3.) By clicking on one of the images, you can view a larger version of it, with its information. And if you click on the icon I’ve pointed to above…
You’ll return to DUVAGA, where you can add the image to your gallery.
This is a great way to sort through a lot of visual information, and to search through a lot of images quickly. Once you have the software installed on your browser, there are a number of other sites (including Flickr and Google Image searches) that it works with, too. Some words of warning, though: The application is very pretty and may be addictive. Also, it won’t work on all computer systems (like my 4-year-old Toshiba at home), but most newer computers should support it. And it does not project in 118 or 119, I think because of the mirroring software we use in those rooms. If you want a live demonstration or help downloading PicLens, let me know!
This week Alex rolled out several changes to the DUVAGA general search and art history search pages that should help you find the images you need. Here are a few changes you’ll see next time you log in:
(click for more detail, and see below for descriptions of changes)
More Accurate Searching with Multiple Terms - You may have noticed some weird results when you searched for more than one word at a time. For example, searching van Eyck in the artist field (see below) would bring up all the images by van Briggle, van de Velde, and Rembrandt van Rijn. While sometimes amusing (searching van Eyck and getting Van Morrison, etc.), this wasn’t really good. Alex has fixed this, so DUVAGA will look for images with both of the terms (“van” and “Eyck”) in the Artist field, rather than either of the terms (“van” or “Eyck”). This change affects all of the free-text fields (artist, title, subject, material, and “all fields”).
Ability to Search for a Term in All Fields - A feature we brought over from the general search page is the option to search “All Fields.” This will be useful if you want all images of or by a certain artist, or if you’re not sure which field something might have been cataloged in, or if you want all images with a certain word in the title, description, or subject field. Some of our images have lengthy descriptions, and this is a great way to find words in those descriptions. If you’re not finding something you think is in the system, try your search term here.
More Accurate Searching by Time Period - The “Time Period” field has been a little problematic in the past, because this field was connected to the artist’s life or activity dates, and not to the actual work. Thanks to a lot of work on the parts of the VMC grad students, we’re adding more accurate information to each image record, and you can now search by dates more reliably by selecting a date range from this drop-down menu. Find images by millenium for BCE dates, centuries for CE dates, plus decades for 19th, 20th, and 21st century dates.
Find Your Requests - There is now an “Instructor” field on the art history search page. This field will help you find images you’ve requested. You can do this from the general search page, too, but this will work better if you want to find, for example, only the images you’ve requested by a certain artist or from a certain country.
Sort Your Results - You can now sort your results by title, artist, or date added. Sorting by title and/or artist should help you identify duplicates and choose which image you want to use. Sorting by “most recent” will help you find your most recent requests, or anything new by a certain artist, etc.
All in all, we think this will help you find what you need on DUVAGA! Please feel free to make suggestions for future enhancements, and do let us know if you aren’t able to find something you think should be in the repository — if it’s there, we’ll help you find it, and if it’s not, we’ll add it!
Over the past year we’ve purchased no fewer than 6,263 new images from a couple of different vendors, including Scholars Resource (which represents several different vendors, including Saskia, Hartill Art Associates, and, recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Davis Art Images. Some of these went “live” on DUVAGA this winter, and we’re still working on getting data imported for many more (many thanks to Alex in CTL, who has devoted many hours to making this easier for us!).
This week I uploaded 239 images from Davis, including collections of Native American art and architecture, early photography, and some Art:21 images. Additionally, there are 205 new images from Scholars Resource, covering topics of design, some nineteenth-century painting, and a handful of works from the Denver Art Museum.
To Find New Images — For faculty, the easiest way to find the images we’ve just purchased is to go into the “Instructor Galleries” tab on the DUVAGA search page, and find my name. I’m making a gallery for each batch upload I do, and from there you’ll be able to copy the images into your own galleries. Of course the images are all searchable through the main page, but this is the easiest way to browse only the latest purchased images. Students can search “Visual Media” as the instructor from the main search page, and go to the end of the results for the newest images.
Please Note — When we purchase commercial images, they come with some basic metadata, which we import into ALORA, our cataloging tool. Sometimes the metadata isn’t quite right, so if you run across errors (in these records, or in general), please let me know about them. Each record is assigned a unique Reference ID number that starts with “ART” followed by a series of number. Just reference that number when you report your problems, and I’ll fix it.
