Artstor has a new look

Artstor logo

If you’re just returning to Artstor after a summer away, you’ll notice that it looks quite a bit different. In July, Artstor moved to a new platform, which will allow it to better integrate with JSTOR and the rest of its parent company, ITHAKA.

Because this meant rebuilding Artstor from the ground up, certain features of the old Artstor have been changed or eliminated altogether. The What’s New page lists all the recent changes. Take particular note that password-protected folders are gone. Image groups can now be shared across the University using a URL, and tags have replaced the old folder system. Personal collections have also been disabled temporarily, although they will be returning in some form in the near future.

Of course, if you have any problems or questions about the new Artstor, please do not hesitate to contact the VRC’s staff!

OIV 4.1 Now Available

OIV logoA new version of Artstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV 4.1) is now available for download here.

OIV 4.1 has a number of new features, which you can learn more about in The Artstor Blog, the August 2016 OIV 4.1 Release Notes, or a short YouTube video. Perhaps most importantly, slide presentations no longer display slide numbers. However, Artstor chose to keep the “Image Viewer Icon” (which opens your image in a separate window, as it appears in Artstor) in the lower right corner of all presentations, where it can sometimes interfere with the image. In OIV 4.1, there is still no way to turn off this feature.

Exploring Rembrandt

Rembrandt, Raising of Lazarus, circa 1630-1632, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Rembrandt, Raising of Lazarus, ca. 1630-1632, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Photograph provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org)

You may have heard that Artstor recently allied itself with ITHAKA, the parent company of JSTOR. (And in case you missed it, Artstor had a pretty funny April Fools’ Day story about it.) Now that two of the leading providers of visual and textual content have joined forces, we should expect to see further integration of their resources.

A new pilot project gives us a glimpse of where this partnership may be heading in the future. Exploring Rembrandt shows how images of the master’s work from Artstor can be linked to articles in JSTOR that discuss them. It is still a small prototype–addressing only five of Rembrandt’s paintings so far–but I think it is easy to imagine how useful this could be on a much larger scale.

New Collections and New Images Available in Artstor

Kwakwaka'wakw artist, Headdress Frontlet, pre-contact, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Kwakwaka’wakw artist, Headdress Frontlet, pre-contact, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Just in time for the holidays, Artstor has released a number of new and expanded collections in the Artstor Digital Library:

New Collections and New Images Available in Artstor

Shaykh Zada, Divan of Hafiz (folio 77r), ca. 1530, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Shaykh Zada, Divan of Hafiz (folio 77r), ca. 1530, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Just this week, the Artstor Digital Library has released over 20,000 new images. New collections include the following:

The following collections in the Artstor Digital Library have also been expanded with additional images:

Shared Shelf Commons Now Available in Artstor

Shared Shelf Commons logoArtstor has integrated Shared Shelf Commons into its search engine. From now on, a UD user searching “All Collections” in Artstor will find all relevant materials from the Artstor Digital Library (1.9 million images), UD’s local Shared Shelf collections (150,000 images), and Shared Shelf Commons (200,000 images).

Shared Shelf Commons is the free, open-access facet of Artstor, available to anyone worldwide, even without a subscription to Artstor. Shared Shelf subscribers like Cornell and UD have been publishing some of their collections to Shared Shelf Commons for several years now. Because of copyright restrictions, the Visual Resources Center’s images are not in Shared Shelf Commons, but many other UD collections are. These include, for instance, the UD Library’s own Franklin C. Daiber Botanical Collection, which was featured in a recent post in the Artstor Blog.

You will now find a list of “Shared Shelf Commons” collections at the center of the main Artstor search page, directly below the list of UD’s “Shared Shelf Institutional Collections” (which includes the VRC’s collection). Note that all of the UD collections listed here under Shared Shelf Commons also appear in the list of Institutional Collections. These particular collections (mostly from the UD Library) now essentially exist twice within the Artstor environment, which means that your search results will include duplicates of these images. It’s an unintended consequence of merging the two systems: the people at Artstor are aware of this little quirk, and will hopefully be fixing it in the near future.

Artstor Workshop

New Artstor LogoSusan Davi and I will be offering an introductory workshop on Artstor on Tuesday, April 14, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm in 116A Morris Library. We will offer training and tips on how to find and download images, create image groups, and use the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) for classroom presentations. We will also discuss Artstor’s Shared Shelf and Shared Shelf Commons, two new ways the University of Delaware is working with Artstor to make our digital image collections available online.

For more information about the workshop, see the announcement in UDaily. Anyone is welcome to attend, but seating is limited. Please click here to register for the workshop.