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.

Apply for our 2014 Summer Internship

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Derek Churchill

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.

Getty Images for Free

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Derek Churchill

After years of filing lawsuits against those who used their photographs without permission, Getty Images (not to be confused with the the Getty Trust and the J. Paul Getty Museum) has made millions of its stock photos free to anyone who wants to use them for noncommercial purposes.

The one big catch: you have to use their “embed” tool to insert their pictures into your site, which may make them too cumbersome to use. Also note that Getty Images is not making all of its images free–just the rather generic stock photos. So, for example, journalists will still have to pay for the more specific images of current events to illustrate their news stories.

You can read more about this important change from Getty Images in places like Bloomberg Businessweek and CNET.

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.

OIV and Mac OSX Mavericks

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Derek Churchill

OSX Mavericks logo Users of Artstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) should be aware that it does not yet work with the newest Apple operating system, Mac OSX Mavericks (version 10.9). Artstor is aware of this incompatibility and is working to fix it, but it may be a few more months until a compatible version is available.

This is a problem that has happened before, and I can pretty much promise you that it will happen again the next time Apple moves to a new version of OSX. For the time being, I encourage OIV users to hold off on getting the free upgrade to Mavericks if at all possible. And please feel free to contact me if you need any help!

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).

ARTstor Workshop

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Susan Davi and I will be offering an introductory workshop on ARTstor on Tuesday, November 5, 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 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.

VRC@UD

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