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Posted by Derek Churchill on May 10, 2013 at 1:16 pm  Adobe announced this week that it will discontinue its sales of packaged software and move its business entirely online. That means you will no longer be able to purchase Adobe’s popular Creative Suite–which includes such applications as Photoshop and Dreamweaver–in the traditional manner.
In place of Creative Suite, Adobe is now advertising its new Creative Cloud, which provides online access to all of its Creative Suite products for a monthly subscription fee of around $50 per month. As soon as you stop paying for your subscription, you will lose access to the software.
As you might expect, early reviews of Adobe’s new business model have been mixed at best. If you’ve been only too happy to buy Photoshop one time and use it for many years (even as it becomes outdated), you’re going to be out of luck in the future. It’s likely that the monthly fees will price many individual users, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses out of the market.
If you prefer the old way of doing things, you can still purchase the current (and as it turns out, last) version of Creative Suite (CS6). Of course there are always alternatives to Adobe products, but few of them are quite as good.
And rest assured that your favorite Adobe applications will always be available for you to use at the VRC. Even with this costly new subscription service, Photoshop is quite simply too central to our mission for us to entertain any thoughts of giving it up.
Posted by Derek Churchill on April 29, 2013 at 9:23 am  Iranian (Safavid), Ardabil Carpet (detail), 1539-1540 (Photo © Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org) Two years ago, I reported that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had launched its Image Library, which allowed users to download images of works from its collection for any purpose. Now LACMA is expanding this service through its new collections website, which vastly increases the number of images available for download from 2,000 to 20,000. And like before, the Museum places no restrictions on your use of these images, so you are free to do whatever you want with them.
Posted by Derek Churchill on April 10, 2013 at 12:59 pm The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has received a major gift in the form of Leonard Lauder’s collection of Cubist art, considered one of the greatest of its kind still in private hands. The 78 works in the Lauder Collection include 33 paintings by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, and 14 each by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger.
You can read the Met’s press release here, and an article about the donation in The New York Times here.
Posted by Derek Churchill on March 27, 2013 at 3:24 pm  ARTstor has announced that it will soon discontinue the use of Java in its Digital Library. This comes after security concerns over Java caused some subscriber institutions to drop support for Java, effectively preventing them from using ARTstor at all. While this has not occurred at UD, we have noticed some technical difficulties with Java recently.
We won’t know how much of a change this will mean for regular ARTstor users until we see it in action, but I suspect it will only require minor adjustments to our current habits. After the switch, downloads will arrive to you as zip files, a change which will likely affect PC users (who may have the added step of “unzipping” the files) somewhat more than Mac users.
The VRC staff will be here to help if you have any problems during the transition!
Posted by Derek Churchill on March 27, 2013 at 2:49 pm  After many years of development, the Getty Research Institute has finally begun to roll out its newest online vocabulary, the Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA). It joins the Getty’s other vocabularies–the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)–all of which have become standard reference tools for cataloguers of works of art.
The aim of CONA is even more ambitious than those of its fellow vocabularies. Whereas the scope of AAT was limited to art historical terms, TGN to place names, and ULAN to artists, CONA will eventually include (in theory, at least) an authoritative record for every work of art and architecture ever created.
As you can imagine, this is a massive undertaking that will require many more years of work. Right now there are only about 1000 records in CONA, and these draw heavily from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, with works like Van Gogh’s Irises. There are also records for some of the major landmarks of world architecture, like the Pantheon and Taj Mahal. The total number of records is still small enough that you will probably have more success exploring CONA by browsing rather than searching. But regardless of its current limitations, for the first time we are getting a glimpse of what will soon become one of the most important metadata resources.
Posted by Derek Churchill on February 25, 2013 at 10:55 am On Wednesday, March 6, there will be a lecture on “Copyright and the Digital Humanities” by Kenneth Crews, director of the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University. This event will take place at 5:00 pm in the Morris Library Reading Room. I have seen Dr. Crews speak in the past, and he actually makes copyright law entertaining!
You can read more about this upcoming talk in UDaily.
Posted by Derek Churchill on February 19, 2013 at 11:41 am  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Loge, 1874, Courtauld Gallery, London ARTstor has released a number of important new image collections recently. These include the following:
- The Courtauld Gallery (one of London’s most renowned small museums; it’s the home to Édouard Manet’s famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and other masterpieces of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting)
- IAP images from the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (the Walters has long contributed to ARTstor, but now it is making available high-resolution images of its works suitable for publication as part of the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program)
- Additional images from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (over 1000 new images from the museum, some of which are also part of the IAP program)
For a more complete list of recent collection releases in ARTstor, click here.
Posted by Derek Churchill on February 19, 2013 at 9:45 am  A new version of OIV that is compatible with Mac OSX Mountain Lion (version 10.8) is now available from ARTstor. To download it, you first need to log into your ARTstor account. In the navigation bar at the top of the main ARTstor search page, click on Tools and select “Download offline presentation tool (OIV).” After accepting the Terms and Conditions of Use, click the radio button next to “OIV 3.1.3 for Mac (Java 6.x; Mac OSX 10.7 and 10.8),” then download.
Posted by Derek Churchill on February 6, 2013 at 9:52 am If you find that you are unable to download images from ARTstor, you may need to upgrade the version of Java that’s running on your computer. You can read ARTstor’s notice for more information on fixing this problem, or stop by the VRC and we can help you out!
Posted by Derek Churchill on November 2, 2012 at 4:28 pm The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just released Rijksstudio, its new online collection of 125,000 images. You have to register (for free) in order to do much with the site, but it does then allow you to download excellent images of works from the Rijksmuseum’s peerless collection of Dutch art. The site’s Terms and Conditions do permit personal use of its images (e.g., in a Powerpoint presentation) without requiring a fee or special permission, but for commercial or professional use (including publications), you still have to apply to the Rijksmuseum by filling out an online form.
 Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro (detail), 1838, Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark, www.smk.dk Not quite so new, but more generous in their terms of use, are the 158 collection highlights released earlier this year as part of a pilot project by the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) in Copenhagen. These images are made available for download and unrestricted use under a Creative Commons license. That means all you have to do is credit the Museum and its website as your image source, and you are free to use these images for any purpose, commercial or not.
You can read more about Rijksstudio here and about the Statens Museum for Kunst’s pilot project here.
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