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.

iPhone war photos: photojournalism or photography?

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Damon Winter’s ‘A Grunt’s Life‘, a photo essay capturing the daily life of US troops in an Afghanistan war zone with the use of the photographer’s iPhone, has won recent praise and an international photojournalism award. It has also stirred up some surprising controversy. The flap is not over the content — standard
photojournalism — or Winter’s use of an iPhone — also not unusual for photojournalists.  Rather, journalists and photojournalists are questioning whether Winter’s ‘fauxlaroids’ are telling the ‘truth. Winter relied on the iPhone app Hipstamatic which applies visual filters resulting in color-shifting and some distortion to create a moody atmosphere. For more on this debate about authenticity and photojournalism, go here, here and here.

Google’s ‘Art Project’

Google has partnered with several major international museums to present a new tool that allows users to explore galleries and view artworks online in extraordinary detail. The project is in its infancy but already 17 museums have agreed to participate and submit high resolution images.

Street View of 'The Ambassadors' at the National Gallery

Among the museums contributing are the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Gemäldegalerie (Berlin), the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA (New York City), Tate Britain and the National Gallery (London), Rijksmuseum and the van Gogh Museum (Netherlands), the Museo Reina Sofia and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), the Uffizi (Florence) and the Hermitage (St. Petersburg). Viewers can virtually explore museums using Google’s Street View and closely explore and zoom into selected paintings. Google has added a ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature that allows users to save views of artworks and build personalized collections with comments that can then be shared with friends. You can discover more at the ‘Art Project‘ website.

Latest updates from ARTstor

ARTstor has just added several new collections to their image holdings: 400 new images from the permanent collection of the Barnes Foundation (including 59 works by Henri Matisse); a themed collection of about 300 images based on the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes (funded by a grant from the Jessica E. Smith and Kevin R. Brine Charitable Trust); and 300 images from the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. ARTstor has also signed agreements with the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (to share the Jean Charlot Collection) and with New York-based artist Andrew Spence.

ARTstor now available through iPad, iPhone and iPad Touch

The ARTstor Digital Library is now accessible to registered ARTstor users through the iPad, iPhone, and the iPod Touch, providing read-only features such as searching and browsing, zooming, and viewing saved image groups. ARTstor is also introducing the Flashcard View for ARTstor Mobile, which allows users to test their knowledge by viewing the image without textual information, and then flipping the image to reveal the image record. This new view can be found under the “Views” menu as “Flashcard.” ARTstor Mobile is only available through the Safari browser. For more information, go to ARTstor’s Help page.

Will Smarthistory replace Art History textbooks?

Most art history students are painfully aware that Gardners Art Through the Ages and Stokstad’s Art History are some of the largest and heaviest textbooks around.  Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to lug those hefty books in your backpack? Art Historians Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker’s Smarthistory may provide some relief. Smarthistory is a free, open, not-for-profit online art history textbook that utilizes multimedia (video, maps, Flickr photos, vi.sualize.us, links and more) to present what they call and “unscripted conversations between art historians about the history of art.” Their use of multimedia and clever text to engage their audience may explain why smarthistory.org is becoming increasingly popular among art history students.

New ARTstor collections

ARTstor recently added several new collections to their database and signed agreements with 2 more major institutions. Among the new additions now available are: important works by Judy Chicago, including almost 400 images and interviews with the artist on her career, books and nonprofit organizations, and 14,000 additional photographs from the George Eastman House. ARTstor now contains approximately 19,000 examples of photographs — from early daguerreotypes to contemporary prints — from the George Eastman House.
New collection agreements have been signed with 3 new collections. The Museum of the City of New York will share approximately 55,000 images of New York City from their Prints and Drawings, and Photographs divisions. The Getty Research Institute is also collaborating with ARTstor to add two new collections: the Julius Shulman Archive and the Alexander Liberman Archive. The Alexander Liberman (1912-1999) archive will contribute 1,500 images of  modern European and American paintings, including works by Cézanne, Duchamp and Rothko. The Julius Shulman collection contains nearly 5,000 iconic photographs of Southern California modern architecture from 1936-1997.

Archives in the Cloud

Omeka, an open source content management software that allows users to create digital archives online, has just released another cloud-based web publishing  platform called Omeka.net Beta for museum archives and scholarly collections. Supported by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Omeka aims “to make collections-based online publishing more accessible to small cultural heritage institutions, scholars, enthusiasts, educators, and students.”  Omeka.net features a range of services to support individual scholars or small collections that include a free website and up to 500 MB of storage; large institutional archives can sign up for a premium paid plan that provides significantly more storage and additional web support and resources. For more information on Omeka and Omeka.net Beta, check out their website and the recently published article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Dead Sea Scrolls go online

AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner

Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Google are collaborating to upload newly digitized images of the 2,000 year old biblical texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Dating from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E., the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the earliest known copies of the Hebrew Bible. Digital copies as good as or even clearer than the original texts will support continued scholarship and protect the original, fragile fragments of parchment and papyrus from further exposure. The project began over two years ago but the development of a new digital imaging process that captures various wavelengths in the highest resolution possible will be in IAA labs soon. IAA expects the first version to go online within six months. Read more and see the project in action.

New collections coming to ARTstor

ARTstor is collaborating with Aida Laleian to share approximately 960 images of architecture in Romania and Armenia in the Digital Library. Laleian, a photographer and scholar, traveled extensively in both countries to document architecture and historic sites. In Romania, she photographed ancient and medieval churches, monasteries, and castles.
ARTstor is also collaborating with the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to share approximately 9,100 images from a variety of special collections in the Digital Library. The collection in ARTstor will consist of images digitized from visual materials held in the University Library, which are relevant to a variety of fields, including Irish political history, theater and costume history, and campus architecture and design.
Available now are new photos of ancient through medieval archaeological and architectural sites throughout Europe and the Middle East by Sites and Photos are now available in the Digital Library. The images provide broad and in-depth documentation of the ancient world, including Classical, Megalithic, Islamic, Crusader, and Gothic archaeology and architecture, as well as Greek and Roman painting, sculpture, mosaics, and decorative arts. The collection is especially strong in its coverage of religious and Biblical sites in Israel, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, and Cyprus.