Open Access Week 2015

This week is Open Access Week, an annual opportunity to highlight the benefits of sharing scholarly research and resources online.

Kevin Smith, director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications at Duke University Libraries, will speak in the Morris Library Reading Room at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, October 21. His lecture, “The Meaning of Publication in the Digital Age, or What Open Access Can Do for You,” is part of UD’s celebration of Open Access Week.

You can read more about it in UDaily.

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.

Brewer Bookplates in Artstor

William P. Barrett, The Library of George Frederick Ernest Albert Prince of Wales, 1904 (UD Library, William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection)

William P. Barrett, The Library of George Frederick Ernest Albert Prince of Wales, 1904, University of Delaware Library, Newark

The University of Delaware Library’s own William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection is the subject of a recent post in the Artstor Blog. The story highlights the Library’s collection of well over 12,000 bookplates dating from the 18th through 20th centuries, all of which can be viewed in Artstor.

The Brewer bookplates represent just one of many image collections from the UD Library that are available in Artstor. And even for non-Artstor subscribers, the Library’s collections are made freely available to anyone through the open-access Shared Shelf Commons.

Artstor and Shared Shelf in UDaily

ARTstor logoYou probably already know that UD is a longtime subscriber to Artstor, but you may not know what Shared Shelf and Shared Shelf Commons (sometimes called “Artstor Commons”) are.

UDaily has just published an article about Artstor and Shared Shelf at UD that may answer some of your questions. The Visual Resources Center has been working with Artstor and the UD Library for years, so please feel free to contact me anytime if you need more information about any of these services!

Apply for our 2014 Summer Internship

The Visual Resources Center is pleased to announce its 2014 Summer Internship in Visual Resources Management.

Undergraduate interns have to be enrolled and in residence in Newark during the summer, and will devote about 10 hours a week to their projects from the beginning of June to the end of August. Your exact schedule is flexible. There is no pay for the internship, but you will receive 3 credits at the completion of your project. You do not have to be an Art History major to apply.

Applying is easy: all you need to send are a cover letter and résumé. Click here to learn more about the internship and how to apply for it. And please feel free to contact me at visualresources@udel.edu if you would like to discuss possibilities for the internship in person.

All applications must be received by Monday, April 21, 2014.

New Collections in ARTstor

Ishtar Gate

Neo-Babylonian, Ishtar Gate, 604-562 BCE, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin

Here is a year-end roundup of some of the notable recent additions to the ARTstor Digital Library:

Also, images from the University of Delaware Library are now featured in the Digital Public Library of America (DLPA).

VisualCat (LUNA) to Be Retired June 30

VisualCat logo

UD’s local image collection, VisualCat (also known as LUNA), is being retired on June 30, 2013, and ARTstor’s Shared Shelf will be replacing it.

Shared Shelf allows us to integrate our local images seamlessly within ARTstor. You can see a list of UD’s Shared Shelf Collections — including UD Art History: Visual Resources Collection — at the bottom center of ARTstor’s search page. Searching for Shared Shelf images is just like searching for anything else in ARTstor.

Shared Shelf logoThe VRC has been migrating its digital image collection from VisualCat to Shared Shelf since February, and we expect to complete the process during the month of July. The vast majority of our images are already available in ARTstor, but a relatively small number of images (about 2,750) will not yet have migrated by June 30, and therefore will be inaccessible for the first few weeks of July. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Please feel free to contact me at any time for assistance during this transition.

Apply for our 2012 Summer Internship

The Visual Resources Collection is pleased to announce its 2012 Summer Internship in Visual Resources Management.

Undergraduate interns have to be enrolled and in residence in Newark during the summer, and will devote about 10 hours a week to their projects from the beginning of June to the end of August. Your exact schedule is flexible. There is no pay for the internship, but you will receive 3 credits at the completion of your project. You do not have to be an Art History major to apply.

Applying is easy: all you need to send are a cover letter and résumé. Click here to learn more about the internship and how to apply for it. And please feel free to contact me at visualresources@udel.edu if you would like to discuss possibilities for the internship in person.

All applications must be received by Monday, April 30, 2012.

Downloading from ARTstor

A sample ARTstor registration form

A sample ARTstor registration form

ARTstor has made an important change to how it allows users to download images. From now on, you must be logged in to your ARTstor account in order to download images. This means that if you have not already registered for an ARTstor account, you probably should do so now.

I have always encouraged users to register for ARTstor, because many useful features are only available to you when you’re logged in. Registration is free, quick, and easy (see the sample registration form at left), and I’m confident that ARTstor will handle your email address responsibly.

You can register in the Log In area at the upper right corner of ARTstor’s Welcome screen. In order to register, you must be at a computer on the UD campus, but after that you can access your ARTstor account remotely for up to 120 days (see below). You may use any email account you want (it doesn’t have to be your UD email account), and it’s generally wise not to choose the same password you use for your email. You may also want to uncheck the two boxes (shown in the sample form at left) to avoid receiving any mailings from ARTstor.

To continue accessing your ARTstor account remotely, you will need to reauthorize it every 120 days (roughly once a semester). To do this, simply log in to your account from a UD computer, and you will automatically get another 120 days.

For more complete information on registering for an ARTstor account, you can find detailed instructions here, or watch a short You Tube video here.