Legend of the True Cross 3-D Model

Do you remember the internet of ten years ago?  You’d type in a web address and play a game of Minesweeper as you waited for the page to load.  Images on the web were small and of poor quality for the most part, took forever to load, and overflowed your e-mail account if you weren’t careful.

We’ve come a long way in terms of technology, and there are some incredibly innovative and useful tools available online now!  One beautiful example is a new site dedicated to Piero della Francesca’s The Legend of the True Cross.  Created by an international team of specialists, the site allows you to view a 3-D model of the chapel (if you are using Internet Explorer), as well as very high-resolution images of the paintings that compose this work (in any browser).  It contains scholarly information about The Legend of the True Cross, and is a great way to visualize how the work actually functions in the location.

Here are some sample images (click to make them bigger, and if you like these, make sure you visit the actual site!):

3-D Model View 1

3-D Model View 2

3-D Model View 3

Chapel Ceiling with details

Detail of Exaltation of the Cross

Contemporary Ceramics!

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.

More New Images – Art:21 and 20th Century Design

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!

Medieval Architecture images on DUVAGA

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!

New: Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque Images

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.

Changes to Art Databases

If you haven’t used ARTstor or Grove Art online yet this month, you’re in for a treat! Both sites have been pretty dramatically redesigned, and I think you’ll find both easier to use.

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ARTstor
If you’ve used ARTstor in the past, you might have been a little frustrated by the speed of the site, or the fact that it opened a new browser window by default. ARTstor has changed the software on which it is built, and seems to have improved quite a bit as a result. It’s now easier to perform searches, and much quicker to load search results. If you use their Offline Image Viewer (OIV), you get an extremely high resolution image. Most ARTstor images are also available for download, and subsequent inclusion in other presentation softwares (such as DUVAGA, where you can add ARTstor images as “personal” images), but if you go this route you will end up with an image too small to zoom in on (though it should be fine for standard, non-zooming projection). As a work-around, you are able to download details of images for use in other presentation software. As always, ARTstor is adding to their collections, which now number in the hundreds of thousands, and cover a lot of images that faculty outside the art field will likely find useful. You can access ARTstor through Penrose Library, and keep up with their latest announcements on their website.

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Grove Art Online is now housed under Oxford Art Online
A new site was launched earlier this month for Oxford Art Online, which encompasses Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. While the new site is different from the old Grove Art Online, it seems like it will be easier to narrow your search to just one or a few of the sources covered, and to limit to types of results (i.e. biography or image). It remains an excellent reference tool for information on artists, movements, techniques, and themes, and now its information is better structured. Access Oxford Art Online through Penrose Library (note: this links you to the correct record and site, it just takes the library world a while to catch up with name changes like this).

If you have questions about or need help using either of these valuable resources, I’m happy to help!

Changes to DUVAGA Classroom Application

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.

New Image Viewer in DUVAGA

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!

Happy browsing!

New on DUVAGA

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.

Enjoy your images!