New Images Available in Artstor

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Derek Churchill

George Caleb Bingham, The Country Election, 1851-1852, Saint Louis Art Museum

New images have recently been added to the Artstor Digital Library:

More than 5,000 additional images of works in the J. Paul Getty Museum
More than 800 additional images of works in the Saint Louis Art Museum
Nearly 3,000 more images of Cyprus and the Mediterranean world from Allan Langdale
More than 60 images of community murals and public art from San Anto Cultural Arts in San Antonio, Texas
Also, there are now more than 100,000 images in Shared Shelf Commons, including thousands from the University of Delaware Library

Art Museums in the News

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed, 1630, Morgan Library and Museum, New York

Here are a few recent stories of interest from the museum world:

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York has digitized its entire collection of Rembrandt etchings. A new online collection of about 500 images lets you explore nearly all of the prints made by Rembrandt during his lifetime. These are not Open Access images, so you cannot do whatever you want with them, but you are permitted to download them for personal, educational, or noncommercial use.
The late Richard Mellon Scaife, who died earlier this month, has left roughly half of his art collection to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The rest of his collection will go to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh). There are few details about the nature of the collection itself, but it is said to consist mainly of American works.

Images from the Museum of New Zealand

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Derek Churchill

John Gully, Milford Sound, 1883, watercolor, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington has made over 30,000 images of works from its collection available for free download. Over 14,000 of these are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license that requires attribution and prohibits any commercial use or the making of derivatives. The remaining 17,000 images have no known copyright restrictions, and are available for any use.

Te Papa is New Zealand’s national museum, and its collections include art as well as history, natural history, and Maori and Pacific cultures. You can read more about this image initiative on Te Papa’s blog, or begin exploring the Collections Online.

Open Access Images from the Met

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Edo culture (Court of Benin, Nigeria), Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made more than 400,000 images of public domain works in its collection available for non-commercial use through its new Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) initiative. You may now download images from its website and use them for scholarly purposes–including print and online publication–without having to request permission or pay a fee. The Museum is letting users decide if their own projects qualify as “scholarly” or “non-commercial”; you can find definitions and examples on the Met’s OASC FAQ page. You may also want to consult the fine print in the Terms and Conditions for the Met’s website. Commercial use of these images is not permitted.

This is not the first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made its images available for free. You have been able to download large images for personal use since its website was redesigned a few years ago, and its collection has been the cornerstone of Artstor’s Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) since that program’s creation. OASC gives users yet another avenue for accessing and using the Met’s images.

New Online Resources

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Hindenburg disaster, 1937, film still from British Pathé

A number of new online sources for images, text, and video are now available:

Getty Research Institute – 77,000 historic photographs of tapestries and Italian monuments are now part of the Getty’s Open Content Program
American Museum of Natural History – 7,000 archival photographs in Digital Special Collections, the new image database of the museum’s Research Library
Bodleian First Folio – a digital facsimile of Shakespeare’s First Folio at Oxford, now releasing digital editions of each of the plays, beginning with Henry V
British Pathé – 85,000 newsreels chronicling events of the 20th century are now available on its YouTube Channel

New Images Available in Artstor

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Installation view of Splendors of China’s Forbidden City, exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, 2004-2005

New images have recently been added to some existing collections in the Artstor Digital Library:

Works in the Baltimore Museum of Art (including the famous Cone Collection)
Exhibition installations at the Dallas Museum of Art
Prints in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Delaware Art Museum’s Online Collection

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Visitors to the Delaware Art Museum‘s website can now search for works in its newly launched online collection. So far, this includes more than 1,000 works of art; the museum’s entire collection is expected to be online by 2018. You can read more about this new feature in the museum’s press release.

Located in Wilmington, the Delaware Art Museum is best known for its important collections of Pre-Raphaelite art; Howard Pyle, the Brandywine School, and American illustration; and John Sloan and the Ashcan School.

Fate of the Corcoran Gallery of Art

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The 140-year history of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC appears to be coming to an end (at least, its history as an independent institution). According to a plan announced this week, the National Gallery of Art will assume responsibility for its renowned art collection and George Washington University will take over its art school and landmark building. Many of the Corcoran’s treasures will become part of the National Gallery of Art’s own collection, while the rest of its 17,000 objects will be dispersed to other museums. Long an institution with serious financial troubles, the Corcoran had previously been considering a merger with the University of Maryland.

You can read more about the Corcoran’s future here.

Wellcome Images

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Derek Churchill

The Wellcome Library of the Wellcome Collection in London has made available over 100,000 free images through Wellcome Images. These images are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so you can feel free to use them for any purpose, as long as you credit their source (“Wellcome Library, London”).

Primarily a museum devoted to the history of medicine, the Wellcome Collection’s holdings include artworks by Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruikshank, Goya, Van Gogh, and Muybridge, among others. You can read more about Wellcome Images here.

New Collections in ARTstor

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Derek Churchill

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:

Works in the Berlin State Museums, which together form one of the world’s greatest art collections (also see ARTstor’s January 2014 update here)
The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York
Works by contemporary artist Rebecca Hackemann
Works by modern and contemporary artists of the African Diaspora from the Mott-Warsh Collection
Paintings, drawings, and sculpture in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Works in the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College

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

VRC@UD

The news blog of the Visual Resources Center at the University of Delaware

Category Archives: Museums

New Images Available in Artstor

Art Museums in the News

Images from the Museum of New Zealand

Open Access Images from the Met

New Online Resources

New Images Available in Artstor

Delaware Art Museum’s Online Collection

Fate of the Corcoran Gallery of Art

Wellcome Images

New Collections in ARTstor