Image Group Download in ARTstor

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Derek Churchill

ARTstor has announced a new feature: Image Group Download. This allows you to download groups of up to 150 images at once, rather than one image at a time. It’s similar to ARTstor’s Export Image Group to Powerpoint feature, only this way the downloaded images don’t automatically go into a Powerpoint file. This can be a real timesaver, and it gives you more flexibility in how you use your images once they’re on your desktop. Note that you may use this new feature to download no more than 2000 images every 120 days.

ARTstor has posted a brief video here to get you started.

Condé Nast Images in ARTstor

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Jack Ziegler, “Damn it, man, do I look like I have any yellow ochre?” (Jack Ziegler/The New Yorker Collection)

Although it has not yet been officially announced, you will now find nearly 5000 images from Condé Nast publications available in ARTstor. This includes, perhaps most significantly, cartoons from The New Yorker (left) and fashion photography from magazines such as Vogue and Glamour.

You can read ARTstor’s original announcement of the Condé Nast collection here.

UPDATE, October 10, 2013: ARTstor has now posted its official announcement of the Condé Nast collection.

Images from the National Gallery, London in ARTstor

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (“The Rokeby Venus”), 1647-1651, National Gallery, London

In one of its most significant additions in recent years, ARTstor has just released images of every painting in the collection of the National Gallery, London. With works ranging from the 13th to the early 20th century, the National Gallery has one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of European painting. Among the more than 2300 images from the National Gallery now available in ARTstor are such masterpieces as Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (left), Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.

You can read more about the National Gallery’s collection in ARTstor here.

The Visual Resources Collection is now the Visual Resources Center

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Derek Churchill

With the start of the 2013-2014 academic year, the Visual Resources Collection officially becomes the Visual Resources Center. Our new name is meant to better reflect the wide range of activities we now undertake in a completely digital environment.

But even with this change, the task of building our online image collections will remain the cornerstone of what we do. And of course we will still be, in every sense, the “VRC.”

Getty Open Content Program

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Greek, Victorious Youth, 300-100 BCE, Getty Villa, Malibu (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

This week the J. Paul Getty Museum joins a growing list of institutions that have decided to remove all restrictions to the use of images of art works in their collections. The Getty’s Open Content Program was announced on Monday, making available an initial group of nearly 4,700 high-resolution digital images of objects from its locations in Los Angeles and Malibu, California. More images, including ones from the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute, will eventually also be added.

You can browse all Open Content images here, or search for particular works on the Getty’s website. A download button will appear under the thumbnail of any images that are part of the Program. You will be asked to provide some very generic information about who you are and what you’ll be using the image for (more specific information is required if you plan to publish it). But aside from that, you are generally free to use the image for any purpose, as long as you simply credit the Getty as the source of the image, as in the caption at left. And all of these images are made available free of charge. You can read more about the Getty’s Open Content Program at the following links:

The J. Paul Getty Museum holds outstanding collections of Greek and Roman antiquities, Medieval manuscripts, European paintings and drawings, decorative arts, and photographs.

Note: Please do not confuse the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Open Content images with Getty Images, a for-profit stock photo company with no connection to the Museum or any other part of the Getty Trust.

Shared Shelf Is Here!

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Derek Churchill

UD’s VisualCat (LUNA) collections were officially retired on June 30, 2013. All of the VRC’s images that were formerly in VisualCat are now available exclusively in our Shared Shelf collection in ARTstor. You can find more details about ARTstor, Shared Shelf, and the former VisualCat in my earlier post.

VisualCat (LUNA) to Be Retired June 30

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Derek Churchill

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.

The 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.

New Collections in ARTstor

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Peter Paul Rubens, Angel, 1610-1611, Flint Institute of Arts

ARTstor has released over 50,000 new images during the month of May, including:

Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, home to the world’s premier collection of 17th-century Dutch art
Images from Lukas — Art in Flanders, featuring works in the museums and churches of Belgium
Works on paper in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Works in the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan

Art Museums in the News

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, 1932-1933, Detroit Institute of Arts

Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes (1932-1933) are a highlight of the Detroit Institute of Arts

There have been some noteworthy stories in the museum world recently:

There are new threats to sell off pieces of the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts to help bail out the city financially. The museum — widely acknowledged as one of the finest in the United States — has faced similar challenges during past economic downturns.
The proposal for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden — the Smithsonian Institution’s museum of modern and contemporary art on the National Mall in Washington — to add an inflatable “bubble” by Diller Scofidio + Renfro to its design has apparently stalled, leading the museum’s director to resign.
It looks like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) may be backing off from its initial plan to tear down the former home of the American Folk Art Museum. The building, designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (who were also responsible for the new Barnes Foundation building in Philadelphia), sits immediately adjacent to MoMA on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. Although praised by architectural critics since its opening in 2001, the museum building proved to be a difficult space for exhibiting art, prompting the American Folk Art Museum to sell it to MoMA and relocate a few years ago.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Adobe announced this week that it will discontinue its sales of packaged software and move its business entirely online. That means you will no longer be able to purchase Adobe’s popular Creative Suite–which includes such applications as Photoshop and Dreamweaver–in the traditional manner.

In place of Creative Suite, Adobe is now advertising its new Creative Cloud, which provides online access to all of its Creative Suite products for a monthly subscription fee of around $50 per month. As soon as you stop paying for your subscription, you will lose access to the software.

As you might expect, early reviews of Adobe’s new business model have been mixed at best. If you’ve been only too happy to buy Photoshop one time and use it for many years (even as it becomes outdated), you’re going to be out of luck in the future. It’s likely that the monthly fees will price many individual users, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses out of the market.

If you prefer the old way of doing things, you can still purchase the current (and as it turns out, last) version of Creative Suite (CS6). Of course there are always alternatives to Adobe products, but few of them are quite as good.

And rest assured that your favorite Adobe applications will always be available for you to use at the VRC. Even with this costly new subscription service, Photoshop is quite simply too central to our mission for us to entertain any thoughts of giving it up.

VRC@UD

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