Last week ARTstor added the last installment of MOMA’s exhibition photographs.  The 16,700 or so photographs document over 70 years’ worth of major exhibitions at the museum.  To find them, just go to the ARTstor website (and log in if you’re not on campus), then search “moma archive” plus any additional terms to narrow your results.

I just read about this great tool, the Graphics Atlas, created by the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester University.  The Graphics Atlas allows you to view minute details of photographic prints produced using different techniques.  You can not only zoom in on the surface of an image to see the emulsion, you can also see the edge of the photo, view it under different lighting conditions (like UV), and compare views of two different processes.

(discovered via Deep Focus, from the UT Austin School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection.)

Last week Google announced the availability of about 2 million images from LIFE magazine’s archives, many of them never published before now.  Over the next few months, the entire archive of about 10 million images should be available through Google’s image search.  To see the images, you can either go to the collection’s main page or do a regular Google image search, but specify that you want to search within the LIFE collection by adding “source:life” to your search string (example: “Dorothea Lange soure:life”).  The images come with some descriptive information, and you can access a decent-sized jpeg image (1280 pixels on the long side), but note that they neither prohibit nor permit use of the images in a context other than Google Image Search.

(results from a search on Matisse)

What can be better than that?  The U.S. Geological Survey’s Photographic Library doesn’t rival the LIFE archive’s size or scope, but the quality is phenomenal and the images are all in the public domain (which means you can use them as you wish, as long as you cite the photographer — more information here).  You’ll find some great examples of early photography on this site, including images by W.H. Jackson, John Hillers, and others.  Also, there’s good coverage of some ancient monuments like Mesa Verde.  The images are positively huge, free to use, and are accompanied by good descriptive information.

(An image of Hovenweep National Monument by W.H. Jackson, 1874.  Full record here)

Earlier this week we uploaded 1,968 new images to the DUVAGA repository!  This latest upload is sort of a hodge-podge collection lots of things, so I hope you’ll take a look to see what might be of use to you!  You can access the latest images by going to DUVAGA, logging in, going to “search,” and then clicking on “instructor galleries.”  All of the purchased images are available in the galleries under “Visual Media Center,” at the top of the page, and galleries with images from this order are dated 11/17/08.  Included:

• Mesoamerican images
• lots of modern design
• some modern architecture
• a handful of 17th and 18th century paintings
• Indian architecture and sculpture
• Japanese prints, paintings, and architecture (including much better Hiroshige prints!)
• some Spanish Colonial works

As always, please let me know if there are problems with the metadata or images (especially the metadata — we process huge amounts of data when we receive these orders, and sometimes the vendors don’t classify things the way we do).  Enjoy!

SFMOMA has unveiled an innovative tool for viewing objects in its collection.  ArtScope arranges some 3,500 of the museum’s works in a grid.  Users can either browse through images using a unique zoom tool, or search for terms in the images’ metadata.  It’s a great way to get an idea of what the museum’s holdings are.

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!):

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!

In July I wrote about the Boston Public Library’s Flickr Collection. This is part of a new trend in image sharing, exemplified by the Flickr Commons. Begun in January as a partnership between Flickr and the Library of Congress, The Commons now includes images from the photo archives of several different institutions, including:

The Library of Congress (collections include News in the 1910s and the 30s and 40s in Color),

The Smithsonian Institution (collections include Portraits of Artists and American Celebrations),

Bibliotheque de Toulouse (including collections of Personages and Portraits, as well as Architecture, Monuments, and Archeology),

The Brooklyn Museum (collections include several on Egypt, as well as an interesting bookplate collection),

The Powerhouse Museum (images of Sydney, rural life in Australia, and Australian flora and fauna),

George Eastman House (includes a collection of autochromes, a set of carte de visites and cabinet cards, among others),

and, added just this week, Britain’s National Media Museum, which has some really great historic photographs.

Keep an eye out for more collections — they’re being added all the time. These are wonderful tools for research, and the images are high-quality and tend to be pretty well documented. Part of the idea behind doing this is that users will help these institutions “fill in the blanks,” adding their own knowledge to an image record with tags and comments. For example, users have suggested that this image, thought by the Library of Congress to be near Creede, Colorado, was actually taken elsewhere. They’ve tagged the image with relevant keywords, and they’ve even tagged specific objects within the image, like the cirrus clouds.

Participating institutions are required to upload images only with no known copyright restrictions, which means the images can be used by anyone for any purpose, which, of course, includes using them in DUVAGA!