Frick Digital Image Archive

The Frick Art Reference Library in New York has just announced the online launch of the Frick Digital Image Archive. Drawing from the Frick’s vast photoarchive, this inaugural release includes 15,000 images documenting many lesser-known works of art that were in American private collections or on the New York art market between 1922 and 1967.

The Frick is also making available the documentation (without images) for these works plus another 110,000 works recorded in its photoarchive through Arcade, the catalog of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC).

You can read more here in the Frick’s press release. As anyone who has ever used the Frick’s photoarchive can attest, this is a major new online resource for scholars.

Dead Sea Scrolls Online

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has teamed up with Google to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls and make them accessible online. The Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project has just released the first five complete scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947, and over the next decade fragments of nearly a thousand scrolls came to light. They are among the oldest and most important Biblical artifacts ever found, yet for years access to them was tightly controlled. The Huntington Library‘s decision in 1991 to make even its photographs of the scrolls available to scholars caused controversy at the time, so this latest development is truly welcome news.

OIV and Mac OSX Lion

Mac OSX LionUsers of ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) should be aware that it does not yet work with the newest Apple operating system, Mac OSX Lion (version 10.7). ARTstor is aware of this incompatibility and is working to fix it.

This problem occurs with every application when a new operating system is first released. The same thing happened with OIV when Apple released OSX Snow Leopard (version 10.6), and ARTstor worked quickly to solve that problem. For the time being, you may want to delay that purchase of a new Mac, make arrangements to use an older Mac instead, or even switch temporarily to using Powerpoint for your presentations.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you need any assistance!

 

Réunion des Musées Nationaux in ARTstor

Réunion des Musées NationauxARTstor has just released the first 4000 of a projected 12,000 images from the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), the premier photo agency for works of art in French museums. Along with the collections of major Parisian institutions like the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, the RMN’s holdings also include works in many of France’s palaces and regional museums. The addition of RMN images instantly boosts the strength of ARTstor’s collections of both French art in general and non-French art housed in French museums. This is easily one of the most significant ARTstor releases in recent years.

You can read more about the RMN collection in ARTstor here.