ARTstor Workshop

ARTstor logoSusan Davi and I will be offering an introductory workshop on ARTstor on Wednesday, November 7 (that’s the day after Election Day), from 2:00 to 3:30 pm in 116A Morris Library. We will offer tips and training on how to find and download images, create image groups, and use the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) for classroom presentations.

This year also will be the first to include a discussion of Shared Shelf, the new partnership between the University of Delaware and ARTstor to unite our digital image collections in one convenient and easy-to-use website.

All are welcome to attend, but seating is limited. Please click here to register for the workshop.

Images from the National Portrait Gallery, London

Attributed to John Taylor, William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, National Portrait Gallery, London

Attributed to John Taylor, William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, (Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London)

The National Portrait Gallery in London joins the growing list of museums making images of the works in their collections available for academic use without charge. But please note that these terms–at least for the largest images they provide–are more restrictive than those in some recent releases (such as the LACMA Image Library or NGA Images). While there is no fee for academic or non-commercial use of their images, you must still apply to the Gallery for permission to use them. Commercial use of their images still requires both a fee and permission.

You can read the full press release below:

 

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY PROVIDES FREE IMAGE DOWNLOADS FOR ACADEMIC AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE

The National Portrait Gallery now provides free downloads of a large range of images from its Collection for academic and non-commercial projects through a new web-site facility. Over 53,000 low-resolution images will now be available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard ‘Creative Commons’ licence and over 87,000 high-resolution images will also be available free of charge for academic use through the Gallery’s own licences.

Since 1997 over 100,000 portraits from the Gallery’s Collection, including paintings, photographs, drawings, prints and sculptures have been digitised. The Gallery was among the first UK institutions to publish images online in a searchable database, and licensing of these images has raised some £5.5 million which has been re-invested in the Gallery’s work. Digitisation of the Collection is part of realising the Gallery’s mission ‘to promote through the medium of portraits the appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture, and … to promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media’.

The new licensing process has been automated through the Gallery’s website but each transaction is individually agreed or denied by Gallery staff, to prevent potential abuse of the system and preserve the important revenue achieved from commercial image licensing. In order to help cover the cost and to highlight the value for beneficiaries of this new facility, users are invited to donate in support of the Gallery’s work. Not all of the portraits in the Collections have yet been scanned, and some are subject to copyright restrictions, so charges and restrictions will continue to apply to accessing some images, as well as to the commercial use of all images. Funds raised by image licensing activity will continue to contribute towards further digitisation.

National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, WC2H 0HE opening hours: Saturday-Wednesday: 10am – 6pm (Gallery closure commences at 5.50pm) Late Opening: Thursday, Fridays:10am – 9pm (Gallery closure commences at 8.50pm) Recorded information: 020 7312 2463 General information: 020 7306 0055 Website: www.npg.org.uk

New Online Image Sources

Several interesting and potentially useful online image collections have launched recently, including:

Guggenheim Foundation in ARTstor

Over 750 images from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation are now available in ARTstor. The collection will eventually include about 7,000 images, with works of art at the Foundation’s five museums (including the flagship museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice), installation views of Guggenheim exhibitions, and architectural views of its world-famous museum buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright in Manhattan and by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain. The strength of the Guggenheim’s collections is in modern art, so copyright restrictions prevent some works from being included in this release (perhaps most notably those of Picasso).

You can read ARTstor’s announcement here.

NGA Images

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat, Dutch, 1632 - 1675, c. 1665/1666, oil on panel, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat, ca. 1665-1666 (photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

BIG NEWS! The National Gallery of Art in Washington has just launched the NGA Images website. There you can download any of their images of works in the public domain (which means almost all of their pre-1900 art). You can read the full press release here.

The images that you can download are 1200 pixels on their long dimension, which is perfect for use in Powerpoint or OIV (see an example here). In addition, if you register on the site, you also get access to 2000-pixel and 3000-pixel images, which are suitable for scholarly publications. And it’s all free of charge!

But what makes this site truly remarkable is that you’re also free to use any of the images you download for any purpose you want, without even having to seek the museum’s permission. It’s all part of the National Gallery of Art’s Open Access policy. This follows the recent news that Yale University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would similarly open their image collections for unrestricted public use. The stature of the National Gallery of Art’s collection makes this an even bigger announcement . . . and another important milestone on the road towards greater public access to online image collections.

New Website for the Ghent Altarpiece

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece (http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be)

Last summer I announced a preview for a new website on Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb, commonly called the Ghent Altarpiece. The completed site, called “Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece,” is now online. Created by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, Belgium, and funded by a grant from the Getty Foundation, this site lets you explore this Early Netherlandish masterpiece up close. In addition to high-resolution macrophotography that allows you to zoom in on minute details, there are also x-rays and infrared images that allow you to look beneath the surface of the paint. The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage has been one of the pioneers in such technical examinations of works of art since the 1950s.

You can visit the site here, and read the Getty’s press release here.

Gothic Past

Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin

St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (http://www.gothicpast.com)

The Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin has launched a new website called Gothic Past, which contains downloadable images of Gothic architecture and sculpture in Ireland. This looks like it could be an important new resource for Irish material that is often hard to find.