Johnson Collection of historic gardens and houses now available

The Library of Congress recently announced the digitization of the Frances Benjamin Johnston lantern slide collection.  Johnston (1864-1952) was a photographer and advocate of the garden beautiful movement.  In support of this movement, Johnston toured the US and Europe during the 1910s and 1930s, presenting lectures on historic gardens and plant life. To illustrate these lectures, Johnston used her own images. She transfered 1,134 of her black and white photographs to lantern slides which she then hand-tinted so that she could illustrate her popular lectures for garden clubs, museums and horticultural societies in color. Johnston’s photographs depict more than 200 sites — primarily private gardens but also horticultural shows, a public library and museum, and several parks. The slides focus on the American East, West, and South but also include some images in Italy, France, and England.

For more on Johnston, her lectures and lantern slides, visit the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection page at the Library of Congress.

Walters Art Museum going online

The Walters Art Museum is now making 10,000 of its 30,000 works available online. The digitization project, funded by NEA and NEH grants, is intended to make the entire collection available online. According to the Baltimore Sun, “the effort will put the Walters at the forefront of the emerging technology of online museums and make it one of the few institutions in the world that allows virtual visitors to explore almost every artwork it owns.” The museum maintains that their collection is in the public domain and can therefore make their high-resolution images available through a Creative Commons license. This position mirrors the Walters’ free admission policy as well. The online catalog comes with detailed information about the works, the ability to zoom and create folders. (source: Baltimore Sun, October 4, 2011)

Frick Photoarchive available online

Scholars can now look forward to accessing the Photoarchive of the Frick Art Reference Library online.  With help from the NEH and the Henry Luce Foundation, the Frick has just released a beta version of its digital image archive containing 15,000 works of art and research documentation for 125,000 works of art. The archive is accessible at images.frick.org. You can access the Frick Reference Library collection through their online catalog FRESCO.
Established to facilitate object-oriented research, the Photoarchive is a study collection of more than one million photographic reproductions of works of art from the fourth to the mid-twentieth century by artists trained in the Western tradition.  To read more about the online Photoarchive, go to the Frick press release.

Collection spotlight: Wellcome images

Wellcome Images: 2000 Years of Human Culture is “one of the world’s richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.” The Wellcome Collection, established by Sir Henry Wellcome to explore the connections between medicine, life and art, provide digital access to their visual materials through Wellcome Images. They currently have 40,000 high-quality digital images available. This database offers an amazing assortment of unusual and diverse material, from historical images to Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leaves or medical teaching devices (such as the eye defect teaching model shown here).

European Film Gateway

Billed as “your single access point to films, images and texts from selected collections of 16 film archives across Europe,” the European Film Gateway (EFG) is a newly developed online portal that provides access to European film archives and cinémathèques. EFG currently contains over 26,000 videos, 515,000 images and 10,200 textual documents. To date, 18 collections are available, including Cinecittà Luce, Cinémathèque française, Cineteca di Bologna, COLLATE, Deutsches Filminstitut, Filmarchiv Austria and Národní filmový archiv.

Welcome back!

Welcome back everyone! Sadly, our too-short summer break has ended but there is plenty to look forward to during the 2011-2012 academic year. This Fall Quarter, you can check out the Art History Colloquium “Art Between Europe & Asia in the First Age of Global Trade” on Friday, September 30th at 3:00 pm (see previous post).  Other events include “Birds: A Kinetic Installation” at the Nelson Gallery, opening on September 29 and running through December 11. “Birds” will display the computer-driven kinetic sculpture of Brooklyn-based artist Chico MacMurtrie. The Design Museum, relocated to Creuss Hall, will present the installation work of Robert Gaylor in “Gyre, A Grand Tragedy of the Commons” (October 10 to December 2). And stayed tuned for the annual Art Studio Visiting Artist Series which will be start this Fall Quarter. More information to come when we get it.

This was a busy summer in the VRF but we did manage to add new material to online catalog. For example, we added gorgeous images of the Modena and Parma Cathedrals taken by Lisa Zdybel last spring, and photos of “Crested Oak,” a site-specific sculpture created by landscape architecture student John Gainey for the Arboretum. Our hours remain the same as usual — Fall Quarter hours are 8:00 am to 4:00 pm Monday through Thursday and Friday by appointment. We hope to see you in the VRF soon.

Calling all compulsive taggers

© Bruce Gilden / Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is looking for a few good taggers — 50 taggers to be exact — to participate in some crowd-source photo tagging.  Hoping to make its archives more accessible, and take advantage of the fact that many of us spend too much time in front of our computers, Magnum Photos is initiating a collaborative annotation project and is looking for volunteer taggers who love photography and want to help shape its site into an online community.  At present, Magnum has 500,000 images online but only 200,000 have information attached to them.  If you’re interested in participating, you can sign up now to become a Magnum tagger. (source: James Estrin, “Crowd-Sourcing the Magnum Archive,” Lens, July 26, 2011)

UK National collection online

Earlier this year, the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation launched an online image collection called Your Paintings with the impressive objective of showcasing the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind these paintings, and where you can go and view the actual works. Your Paintings is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the UK. Collections and museums from across the UK are supporting this effort to digitize and present online 200,000 oil paintings in UK national collections. Over 60,000 of these publicly-owned paintings are currently online. Critics, scholars, and artists also provide virtual guided tours and discuss the art that inspires them.

Discover Yale Digital Commons

Yale University has announced that they will provide free access to the millions of items housed in their museums, archives and libraries through their newly developed catalog Yale Digital Commons or YDA. So far, Yale has digitized slightly over 250,000 of its 1.5 million items. Yale’s collections are broad ranging and deep — from vertebrate zoology to hand-written Mozart compositions. Users can search by institution (the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Art Gallery, Library and Center for British Art), by creator, document type (ie. animals, coins, prints), topics (ie. landscape, Tanzania), era and more. Yale is the first of the Ivy Leagues to make its collections freely available and it hopes this approach will encourage scholars to look to their collections for inspiration. At this point, Yale is not placing any limitations on use of the digital images YDA makes available.

New images added to ARTstor

ARTstor has just released additions to two of its existing collections: ART on FILE and the Islamic Art and Architecture Collection.
ART on FILE has expanded to include 1,100 new photographs documenting contemporary architecture in the United Arab Emirates. Included in these additions is the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai by Skidmore, Owings and Merrell, and the Dubai Marina. With these additions, ART on FILE, which focuses on contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and public art, now has more than 11,700 images in ARTstor.
The Islamic Art and Architecture Collectionwas created by Professors Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom and Walter Denny with material from their personal collections and archives. They have added 250 new images of Iznik ceramics from the Ottoman period bringing their ARTstor holdings to 19,009.
And finally, ARTstor has reached a new agreement with the Baltimore Museum of Art to include 2,000 images from its permanent collection. The historic Cone Collection will be among the new material.