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.

The Commons on Flickr

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!

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!