Derivative Image

BMW Tate Live: Online Live Performance Series

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:57:00 +0000

Live performance art in an online space with a global community of viewers participating via social media: with its new BMW Tate Live: Performance Room program the Tate is re-envisioning the Internet as a primary space in which artists can create and present their work.

Jérôme Bel inaugurated this experimental series of five performance events on March 22, and will be followed by Pablo Bronstein on April 26, Emily Roysdon on May 31, Harrell Fletcher on June 28, and Joan Jonas on a date to be announced.

How will the artists play with virtual communications and help redefine what an exhibition space can be? You are invited to find out by visiting Tate’s YouTube channel on the specified date of each performance at 8:00pm UK time (12:00pm PT; 1:00pm MT; 2:00pm CT; or 3:00pm ET in the US). Audience members are encouraged to participate online with questions to the artists and curators and by interacting with each other via the Tate's social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and by using the Twitter hashtag #BMWTateLive.

The performances will be archived and available for online viewing at a later date.

Expansion of Google Art Project Announced

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:43:00 +0000

Today the Google blog announced a major expansion of content available in the Google Art Project. A little over a year ago the VRC reported the launch of this resource. I noted then that while its scope was relatively small -- with only 1,000 images from 17 museums -- the Art Project had the potential to become an incredible resource over time. I am pleased to see that the Art Project now includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks. These represent a more diverse cultural range that includes sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries. There are currently Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way.

In addition to more images, some other new elements include:

New tools, called Explore and Discover, let you find images by period, artist, or artwork type.
Integration of Google+ and Hangouts on the site.
Better quality of Street View images.
46 artworks are now available in super high "gigapixel" resolution.
The My Gallery feature, which allows you to build, annotate, and share personalized galleries.

Want to know more about the Google Art Project. The FAQs page is a great place to start. Have fun exploring!

NGA Images: High Resolution Images and Open Access Policy at the National Gallery of Art

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:53:00 +0000

On Friday the National Gallery of Art (NGA) announced the launch of its new online image resource, NGA Images. Here you can find over 20,000 high-resolution open access images from the NGA collection. These images depict works that the NGA believes to be in the public domain, and are available free of charge for any commercial or non-commercial use. There is no need to seek permission before using these images.

"As the Gallery marks its 71st anniversary, it is fitting that we introduce NGA Images and an accompanying open access policy, which underscore the Gallery's mission and national role in making its collection images and information available to scholars, educators, and the general public," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "In turn this supports research, teaching, and personal enrichment; promotes interdisciplinary research; and nurtures an appreciation of all that inspires great works of art."

This is good news for scholars, and represents the continuation of a welcome trend in museums to make public domain images freely available.

See the NGA press release here.

Public Art Archive and WESTAF

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:23:00 +0000

I've recently been in contact with a Visual Resources Association colleague who works for the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), a regional non-profit arts service organization "dedicated to the creative advancement and preservation of the arts." This conversation reminded me about the Public Art Archive, an interesting WESTAF project that is still in beta. Selected pilot organizations have begun importing their collections into the archive; these include the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, the Oregon Arts Commission, the City of New Haven, and the City of Las Vegas Arts Commission.

You can do a keyword search for public artworks by artists, places, materials, etc., then refine your search by artist name, date, artwork type, material, etc. Each work's entry page includes authoritative and detailed description information; a selection of thumbnails; a Google map; a link to the artist's Web site; and video and audio files when available.

The archives About page describes ways that the Public Art Archive will become increasingly useful to artists and artist agencies, the general public, and researchers, and public art administrators. I look forward to seeing how this resource develops.

WESTAF's other activities are also of interest to those who produce, study, and manage visual culture. These include:

GO:GrantsOnline™, fully customizable, robust, and flexible online grants management system
CallforEntry.org™ (CaFÉ™), an online application and adjudication management system used by public art programs, galleries, museums, and educational institutions to manage public art commissions, exhibitions, fellowships, and visual art competitions
ArtJob.org, an online arts job bank that lists national opportunities for arts administrators and others as well as internships, grants, public art projects, and residencies
ArtistsRegister.com, an online gallery that allows visual artists to showcase their work and connect with private collectors, gallery owners, interior designers, corporate art buyers, public art administrators, and general art enthusiasts
ZAPPlication.org®, an online application and adjudication management system used by more than 400 art fairs, festivals, and shows
CreativeSpaceAgent™, an online system that matches artists, musicians, and other creative people seeking studio, rehearsal, or performance space with those offering spaces for lease or purchase (currently deployed in the Denver metro area)
Creative Vitality™ Index (CVI™), a sophisticated creative economy report that measures and provides highly reliable and comparable data about the health and vitality of an area's creative sector, including for-profit and non-profit endeavors, businesses, and organizations.

Share Interactive Images with ThingLink

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:05:00 +0000

Would you find it useful to share interactive images you have tagged with notes and links to Web sites? If so, you might want to give ThingLink a try. This tool lets you create hot spots on images, which when clicked on reveal the notes that you have added and lead the viewer to the Web sites of your choosing. You can tag individual images or enable ThingLink for your entire site. It's easy to use, with a free basic account that should provide most instructors and students with the features they need. In just a few minutes I registered for an account, uploaded the image above, and created some tags for it. Once I had saved my work I simply copied the embed code that was provided and pasted it into this post, and I was also given the option to share a link to the tagged image on the ThingLink site (https://www.thinglink.com/scene/232552176386310144#tlsite).

ThingLink provides ways to create more active engagement with images. Of course, you can link to sites featuring text, but with links to video and audio files an image might also serve as a multimedia launcher. There is an option to allow anyone to edit an image, so you could have students interact with images you have posted, or have them post and tag their own images as part of an assignment. There are lots of possibilities here -- we would love to know if you decide to use ThingLink in your teaching.

Image: profzucker (Steven Zucker), Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii in frame with viewer (detail), 2011, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Technology Trends in Higher Ed: The 2012 Horizon Report

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:06:00 +0000

Are you interested in learning about the key technology developments that will affect your place within higher education in the coming years? If so, check out the NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition. A collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, this is an annual must-read for those of us who wish to keep abreast with the emerging technology trends in academic teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.

Each year the report identifies six technologies to watch, placed along adoption horizons ranging from near- to far-term, as well as a discussion of the key trends and significant challenges affecting the adoption of new technologies in higher education.

Why should we pay attention to the Horizon Report? Many technologies cited in previous years' reports have since become commonplace in our academic vocabularies and practices, and those of us who fail to understand them risk being perceived as out of touch. Examples include social networks and knowledge webs, smart phones, grassroots video, user-created content, new forms of scholarly communication, cloud-based computing, geolocation technology, and electronic books.

Six Technologies to Watch in 2012

mobile apps (time to adoption: one year or less)
tablet computing (time to adoption: one year or less)
game-based learning (time to adoption: two to three years)
learning analytics (time to adoption: two to three years)
gesture-based computing (time to adoption: four to five years)
'Internet of Things' (time to adoption: four to five years)

Following an introductory overview, each of these areas includes a section on their relevance for teaching, learning, research, or creative expression; a sampling of specific applications; links to specific examples; and links to articles and resources for further reading.

Key Trends

People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models.
There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning. Challenge-based learning and similar methods foster more active learning experiences, both inside and outside the classroom.

Significant Challenges

Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of higher education.
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities.

Image: Oriano Nicolau, Horizon magic-Traveling around a magic world, 2007. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Personal Digital Archiving at iLibrarian

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:25:00 +0000

Do you feel that your personal digital files are becoming increasingly difficult to manage? Our ever-growing collections of digital assets such as documents, photographs, music, videos, correspondence, and Web sites make us vulnerable to data loss. What steps can we take to protect these valuable assets? Enter Ellyssa Kroski from iLibrarian. Today she wrapped up her eight-part series on personal digital archiving. Following an introductory overview that addresses challenges, obstacles, and the difference between backups and archives, the remaining posts cover the areas of strategy, storage options, file formats, policy, implementation, cataloging, and stewardship. Written for the layperson and based on a three-hour workshop that Kroski offers, this is a thorough yet concise introduction to concepts and strategies we should all consider for our own personal digital archives.

In her conclusion Kroski also provides links to resources she found exceptionally useful as she gathered content for her workshop.

Personal Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Memories: Library of Congress
Creating a Personal Digital Archive: ABC News
Digital Preservation Management Tutorial: Cornell University Library
Decoding the Digital: A Common Language for Preservation: British Library Conference Proceedings

Image: dolescum (Anne G), Archives' stacks, 2009, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

African American History Month: A Selection of Image Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:59:00 +0000

February is African American History Month. To celebrate we have assembled a selection of sites that feature images related to African American history. Know of other significant collections? Please share in the comments.

The African-American Mosaic
A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture. "This exhibit marks the publication of The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture…" Covers colonization, abolition, migrations, and the WPA.

African-American Odyssey
From the Library of Congress' African-American collections, this online exhibition includes links to Frederick Douglass Papers; Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s; Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938; From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909; and Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860.

African Mosaic: Celebrating a Decade of Collecting
"This exhibition pays tribute to the extraordinary variety of individual works of art that come into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art as gifts or purchases. Together, these artworks represent 10 years of building a permanent collection that embodies the diversity and outstanding quality of Africa’s arts."

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and University of Virginia. "The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World."

Digital Durham
From Duke University. "Digital Durham website offers students, teachers, and researchers a range of primary sources with which they can investigate the economic, social, cultural, and political history of a post-bellum southern community... The new materials on Digital Durham touch on over 600 topics including African American business enterprise, the emergence of textiles, tobacco production and marketing, child labor, prohibition, evangelical revivalism, nineteenth-century medical practices, women's experience of childbirth, and public and private education."

Digital Schomburg Images of African Americans from the 19th Century
From the New York Public Library. "The images selected for presentation in this database are drawn primarily from 21 discreet collections at the Schomburg Center: sixteen personal, organizational and photographers' collections, many of which are complemented by substantial bodies of letters, diaries, minutes and other textual documents; four collections representing examples of the various presentation formats common to nineteenth century portrait and genre photography; and a collection of wood engravings from the illustrated U.S. press of the nineteenth century"

Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom
From the Collections of the Library of Congress. "This year's theme "African Americans and the Civil War" honors the efforts of people of African descent to destroy slavery and inaugurate universal freedom in the United States. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society."

Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs
From the University of Virginia Library. "Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States. His photographs -- most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved -- provide a unique view of southern education during the first half of the twentieth century."

Pictures of African Americans During World War II
From the National Archives. These images "illustrate African-American participation in World War II. The pictures were selected from the holdings of the Still Picture Branch (NNSP) of the National Archives and Records Administration. The majority of the pictures were chosen from the records of the Army Signal Corps in Record Group (RG) 111, the Department of the Navy in RG 80, the Coast Guard in RG 26, the Marine Corps in RG 127, and the Office of War Information in RG 208."

Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection
From Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. "Digital collection of over 250 images of African Americans dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, selected from the George and Huestis Cook Photograph Collection at the Valentine Richmond History Center. The digitally scanned images on this site are of prints from glass plate negatives or film negatives taken by George S. Cook (1819-1902) and Huestes P. Cook (1868-1951), primarily in the Richmond and Central Virginia area. The Cook Collection consists of over 10,000 negatives taken from the 1860s to the 1930s in Virginia and the Carolinas."

Image: Clay, Edward Williams, America / E.W.C., c1841. From Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom.

What Happened to Google's Advanced Image Search?

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:35:00 +0000

A couple of people have remarked to me lately that they can no longer find Google's Advanced Image Search feature. Google is known for its clean design, and they have also been working toward a more consistent user experience across their various services. In keeping with these principles they recently simplified their image search interface.

Take heart; you can still get there from here. Go to the Image Search page and look for the gear icon in the upper right corner. Voilà! All of the options are still there: Image size, aspect ratio, type of image, source of image, color in image, usage rights, file type, and region.

FOLLOW UP: Sigh... Not long after I posted this, Google tweaked the Image Search page once more. Now you must enter a search term first, then look for the gear icon. Clean design, yes, but not exactly intuitive.

SOPA and PIPA

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Why have Wikipedia, Craigslist, and so many other sites gone dark today? Why is there so much controversy about SOPA and PIPA? Many people feel that protecting intellectual property is important, but that these anti-piracy bills would amount to censorship with drastic consequences for the Internet as we know it today. Can we come up with better solutions to the problems? Take a little time today to learn more about SOPA and PIPA, and contact your senator if what you learn concerns you.

Proposed legislation:

Learn more:

Take action:

Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education from ACRL

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:40:00 +0000

The ubiquity of images and visual media -- together with their great power to persuade, contextualize, engage, and illustrate -- underscore the importance of visual literacy today. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), which published its Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education over a decade ago, recently released its visual complement: Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. These standards define visual literacy as "a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media."

Relevant to studies in any discipline, these standards aim to provide educators with "an intellectual framework and structure to facilitate the development of skills and competencies required for students to engage with images in an academic environment, and critically use and produce visual media throughout their professional lives."

Detailed performance indicators and learning outcomes expand on each of the following seven standards:

The visually literate student determines the nature and extent of the visual materials needed.
The visually literate student finds and accesses needed images and visual media effectively and efficiently.
The visually literate student interprets and analyzes the meanings of images and visual media.
The visually literate student evaluates images and their sources.
The visually literate student uses images and visual media effectively.
The visually literate student designs and creates meaningful images and visual media.
The visually literate student understands many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding the creation and use of images and visual media, and accesses and uses visual materials ethically.

Of course, these issues are the bread and butter of visual artists and art historians in academia; after all, this is what you do. However, the standards note that "visual literacy education is typically a collaborative endeavor, involving faculty, librarians, curators, archivists, visual resources professionals, and learning technologists." There are many ways that the VRC can support your students in pursuit of each of these standards. These include, but are not limited to, help with:

identifying a variety of image sources, materials, and types;
finding and accessing images and visual media effectively and efficiently;
retrieving or reproducing the needed image using appropriate technologies or systems (e.g., download functions, copy and paste, scanning, cameras);
making judgments about the reliability and accuracy of image sources;
using technology effectively to work with images;
using a variety of tools and technologies to produce images and visual media;
understanding many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding images and visual media (including intellectual property, copyright, and fair use).

We look forward to discussing ways that we can support your teaching in pursuit of these goals. Drop us a line!

Image: Michael Coghlan (mikecogh), Buddha with Swastika, 2011, available from Flickr under a Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Fall 2011 Commencement Images

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:44:00 +0000

The VRC has posted our images from the Department of Art and Art History's fall 2011 commencement ceremony on our Flickr page. Congratulations to all, our very best wishes for the future, and please stay in touch with the department. Our Alumni Newsletter and Facebook are easy ways to let us (and your classmates) know where life is taking you.

Do you have images from this or other departmental events? Please help us document our departmental history by joining the department's Flickr group and sharing them there.

Garrison Roots, We Will Always Miss You

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:06:00 +0000


Garrison,Visual Arts Complex Dedication Ceremony. Sept. 2010

The Department of Art and Art History is mourning the passing of Garrison Roots. He was our chair, a professor of sculpture, an active practicing artist, and all around sterling human being. While his death was not entirely unexpected, the loss we feel today is very deep.

Garrison guided the department as we moved from an amorphous program plan to our newly constructed Visual Arts Complex. While our fabulous new state-of-the-art home is a physical monument to his achievements, Garrison's less visible contributions to the soul of our department were even more important. He was a unifying force who chose to see the best in every human being. He gave everyone a forum to speak and the agency to act, which made us all feel like invested members of a community, even part of a family.

Personally, I appreciate so much the kind support and great humor he always shared with me. I tried not to abuse the open door policy in his office, but his approachability made it so easy to just drop by to say hello or bring up any issues on my mind. And while it's pretty unusual for anyone to look forward to staff meetings, we always did because they were productive yet full of laughter and good cheer.

Garrison was a humble person who always insisted on sharing credit whenever he was praised. I wish he were here now to protest, saying that our new building was the result of the work of many people, and that our department is where we are today because the faculty and staff have made it that way. True, true, Garrison, but these things do not happen without great leadership. We thank you, and we will always remember you with much love, respect, and gratitude.

Historic Advertisements from Duke Library: Ad*Access and Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:09:00 +0000

Looking for visual inspiration from advertising? Check out two collections from Duke Library: Ad*Access, which offers over 7,000 images of U.S. and Canadian advertisements dating between 1911 and 1955, and Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920, featuring over 9,000 images relating to the early history of advertising in the United States.

Ad*Access
The main categories are Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II Propaganda. You can also browse and search by Company, Product, Date, Publication, Subject, Medium, Headline, andAudience.

Note the section on Copyright and Citation. Most of these advertisements were published after 1923, which means they are still protected by copyright. Under the fair use exemption to copyright, Duke makes them available to you for use in research, teaching, and private study, on the condition that you provide proper attribution of the source in all copies. You must seek permission for other uses. Detailed information on how to properly cite and seek permission to use these images is provided on this page.

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920
Browse the collection by Company, Product, Date, Format, Publication, Subject, Medium,and Headline.

As with Ad*Access there is a Copyright and Citation page, with an explanation that these images are available for your use in research, teaching, and private study. While it's arguable that Duke cannot claim copyright to these pre-1923 images, and therefore cannot require permission for other uses (such as publication), it is certainly good form to contact them before doing so.

Little Guides from JISC Digital Media

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:45:00 +0000

JISC Digital Media has created a series of Little Guides in response to frequently asked questions. Perhaps of most interest to our readers is The Little Guide to Finding Digital Media Resources (PDF). This guide includes links to JISC's online tutorials on searching the Internet for images, audio resources, and video and moving images, as well as links to general sites with a focus on free-to-use and low-cost media resources.

Other JISC Little Guides address Copyright, Cloud Computing, Podcasting, and Screencasting.

In general, JISC Digital Media provides a wealth of helpful information for those in higher education anywhere, but do keep in mind that JISC is a service aimed at a UK audience. Some of the resources cited here are slanted in this direction.

Image: Ryan Thompson (Warmest Regards), consulting the guide books, 2010. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Copyright, Fair Use, and Online Images

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:38:00 +0000

A recent conversation with someone in the Art and Art History department reminded me that confusion over the online use of copyrighted images persists, even among some faculty members. This really comes as no surprise. Copyright is complex, the parameters of fair use are murky, and the fair use of digital images require us to consider elements that didn't exist when the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed. It's a mystifying topic for most of us. Over at the Social Media Examiner, Sara Hawkins has written a very helpful piece, Copyright Fair Use and How it Works for Online Images. As an attorney, Hawkins is well versed on this subject, and here she provides an excellent overview of the issues that we should consider before using others' images online.

While brief, the article does a great job of introducing this complicated subject. After discussing key points about copyright and fair use, Hawkins outlines "5 Things to Think About Before Using Copyrighted Images":

Do you understand the term fair use?
Why are you using the image?
Have you transformed the image?
How much of the image are you using?
Are you willing to risk your site being taken down, getting a cease and desist/bill/DMCA or being sued?

In summary Hawkins notes,"When it comes to photos, when in doubt, assume it’s subject to copyright and don’t use it without the appropriate permission." Check out the article -- it's rare to find such a straightforward and clear introduction to this topic.

Image: Jason Pettus (jasonpettus), mytatt.jpg, 2007, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Historical Medical Images Online

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:34:00 +0000

A graduate student recently asked me about where she might find historical medical images online. I am posting these resources here because this is a recurring topic of interest among faculty and students in both art history and studio arts. Do you have other suggestions? Please share them with us.

Wellcome Images
Over 40,000 current and historical medical images; "Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science." Explore Wellcome images here.

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM)
"Provides access to nearly 70,000 images in the collections of the History of Medicine Division (HMD) of the U.S National Library of Medicine (NLM)." Search for IHM images here.

Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration (New York Public Library)
"Hundreds of images from the thirteenth through the early twentieth century, in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, geology, mathematics, medicine, and physics, as represented by manuscript illuminations, engravings, lithographs, and photographs." Discover Pictures of Science images from the NYPL Digital Gallery here.

Historical Medical Poster Collection (Yale's Cushing/Whitney Medical Library)
"The collection ranges from large size posters meant to be pasted on the sides of buildings and viewed from afar to small glossy placards designed for store windows...The collection focuses primarily on public health communications, but also has examples of medical product advertising, recruiting, and aid and relief solicitations." Find images from the Historical Medical Poster Collection here.

Image: Clemente Susini, Wax anatomical figure of reclining woman, 1771-1800, Florence.Science Museum, London, Wellcome Image. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Christian Iconography from Augusta State University

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:36:00 +0000

Who's that woman holding the cloth depicting an image of Christ? If you have ever found yourself wondering who is featured in a particular scene from a medieval or early modern work of art , Christian Iconography could be a valuable resource. From Augusta State University, this work-in-progress is intended "to support the study of Christian iconography at the beginner's level." Its taglines are "Learn how to identify the saints in medieval and renaissance art. Read the stories that the paintings refer to. Find out the 'why' behind traditional elements in paintings of scriptural events."

You can enter a keyword to search for a particular iconographical element, or you can explore links on specific saints, topics, or selected scriptural events which are divided alphabetically. Each of these is illustrated by one or more images. There are also links to other sites useful in the study of Christian iconography, as well as a bibliography of recommended readings.

Image: euthman (Ed Uthman), Hans Memling: St. Veronica, c. 1470/1475, 2009. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

Delicious: A Resurrection Ahead for Social Bookmarks?

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 03:51:00 +0000

If you've seen the VRC's bookmarks over at Delicious you know that we have assembled over a thousand bookmarks from Web sites pertaining to art, architecture, archaeology, museums, images, and related information resources. We have tagged these links with labels to help you navigate through them and find sites of interest. And more importantly, we are not alone -- over 5 million other individuals and organizations have bookmarked and tagged almost 200 million sites. Pick just about any topic and Delicious can lead you to new online resources, and to other users with similar interests who have publicly shared their bookmarks.

So far so good. But a troubling development came to light last year. A leak at Yahoo!, which had acquired Delicious in 2005 and had done little since to develop its potential, indicated that the service was to be "sunsetted," which many interpreted as "to be shut down." Yahoo! publicly declared that this meant that they would be selling Delicious, rather than ending it. But many users by now had decided that investing time in social bookmarking at Delicious was a risky endeavor. Many accounts, including the VRC's, were left in a holding pattern until the dust settled.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust aside, Delicious was acquired in April by AVOS Systems, a company founded by the creators of YouTube. As reported in a New York Times piece today, these entrepreneurs are now using their expertise to breath new life into Delicious. Among their goals is greater ease of use and broader adoption. These will be fueled by the collective desire for better control of the torrential flow of information that we all experience. As Chad Hurley states, “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing." We look forward to watching the developments at Delicious, and resuming our bookmarking activities soon. Stay tuned!

Image: Daniel Andrlik (mointrigue), Delicious Is Dead, 2010, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

VRC Bombay TV 2 Video

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 01:26:00 +0000

To illustrate some of the ways we help our faculty and students, and also to show that we do our jobs with humor while striving for excellent services and products, the VRC has created a very short and hopefully entertaining video about our scanning services. We used Bombay TV 2, a site offering a selection of clips from vintage Bollywood movies, which you can choose, arrange into a sequence, and provide subtitles to create your own movie. See the video here:

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/v2/play.php?id=152979

But seriously, if you are faculty member or student in the Department of Art and Art History, please ask us how we can make your life easier. Scanning? Training? Equipment? If you are in need of a service or equipment item that we don't currently offer but which fits within our mission -- to provide and facilitate access to images, imaging, and related information resources for teaching and research -- we would like to hear about it.

Disclaimer: No faculty members, students, or Bollywood stars were harmed in the making of this video. All characters are fictional; any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidence and unintended (except the guy who gets thrown through the plate glass window -- that really happened!). The VRC welcomes discourse about the representation of American academic problems as expressed through the representation of an Other culture, namely that of upper-class 1970s Mumbai, which itself is represented here through the lens of 1970s Hindi cinema. Similarly, we invite the discussion of any post-colonial ethical issues that may be called into question by framing this presentation with humor, or questions arising from the androcentric positioning of an aggressive male protagonist who is assisted entirely by female characters -- especially if these discussions occur over lattes.

Are Your Images Safe?

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:03:00 +0000

The VRC has returned from our all-too-short summer break -- welcome back! I'd like to kick off the new school year with a cautionary tale. This July my brother's and sister-in-law's home was flooded, destroying the family computer. They did have an automatic backup system in place, saving regularly to an external hard drive. However, the hard drive was also destroyed in the flood. Fortunately, they periodically saved data to DVDs and stored them elsewhere, but the family lost all of the information on the computer that had been created since the last backup.

Many of us invest a significant amount of time, energy, and money in creating, collecting, and storing our images: they support our professional activities and function as an archive for our most treasured memories. Have you thought carefully about the ways that yours are vulnerable?

I have written about backup strategies before. Backups are a very important aspect of ensuring the ongoing safety and accessibility of your images. But there are other factors to consider, such as methods of organizing, file naming, migrating, and monitoring both your collection and developments in technology, products, and standards. SaveMyMemories.org is a nice site that provides a layperson's introduction to developing a strategy for curating your collection of personal images. Its main categories are:

Learn (hardware; software; other factors)
Prepare (plan; create categories; label photos; manage photos)
Protect (transfer to storage; make backup plan; how to backup)
Recover (camera card failure; hard drive crash; virus attack)
Resources (provides lots of links, organized into categories, to important sources for more information)

The VRC is always happy to discuss issues, share resources, and learn about new resources to better serve the needs of our faculty members' and students' personal image collections. Drop us a line and tell us what's on your mind!

Image: Rachel Zack, Mom, 2007. From Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

YouTube Now Lets You Search for and Assign Creative Commons Licenses

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:34:00 +0000

Creators and remixers now have have a great new option to share and play with content, without worrying about copyright. YouTube has introduced a feature in its Video Editor that allows users to assign a Creative Commons license (CC-BY) to their videos. To mark videos with a CC license, simply click the radio button labeled "Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" at the time of uploading, or go to My Videos, select edit for the video for which you wish to assign the CC license, scroll down to Broadcasting and Sharing Options, and select the CC option.

Those wishing to find content they may use under a CC license can find it in the Video Editor by simply clicking the CC tab at the top of the page. You can conduct a keyword search, with only CC-licensed videos appearing among the search results. To add a video to your storyboard, click on the 'plus' symbol (+) and remix away!

For more information, including important details about the rights and responsibilities involved, see YouTube's page on Creative Commons. You can view the terms of the CC-BY license at the Creative Commons Web site.

Internet Archive: A Rich Source of Video, Audio, Text, and More

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:18:00 +0000

Have you gotten lost in the Internet Archive yet? It's non-profit "digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form," which features a huge array video, audio, text, and other items of potential interest to both artists and scholars alike. The site offers so much that it's difficult to do justice to it in a brief blog post. Its main offerings are divided into the Wayback Machine (over 150 billion archived web pages), Moving Images, Texts, Audio, and Software. You can conduct keyword and advanced searches across the entire archive, or browse by various sub-collections. Explore the reviews, spotlight items, most downloaded items, and staff picks. Below is a brief overview of each of the main Internet Archive areas.

Wayback Machine
"Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible."

Moving Images
"This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download." The sub-collections are Animation & Cartoons, Arts & Music, Community Video, Computers & Technology, Cultural & Academic Films, Ephemeral Films, Movies, News & Public Affairs, Prelinger Archives, Spirituality & Religion, Sports Videos , Television, Videogame Videos, Vlogs, and Youth Media.

Texts
"Contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books." This comprises almost 3 million digitized items, including a lot of great vintage and historical texts. These can be read online or downloaded to your computer. The sub-collections are American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Universal Library, Community Texts, Project Gutenberg, Children's Library, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Additional Collections.

Audio
"Contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download." The sub-collections are Audio Books & Poetry, Community Audio, Computers & Technology, The Grateful Dead, Live Music Archive, Music & Arts, Netlabels, News & Public Affairs, Non-English Audio, Radio Programs, and Spirituality & Religion.

Software
"The Software Archive is designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles. The collection includes a broad range of software related materials including shareware, freeware, video news releases about software titles, speed runs of actual software game play, previews and promos for software games, high-score and skill replays of various game genres, and the art of filmmaking with real-time computer game engines." The sub-collections are Game Patches, 301Works.org, DigiBarn, CD Bulletin Board Software Archive, Infochimps, Open Source Software, and Tucows Software Library.

Europeana: 15 Million Images, Videos, Audio Files, and Texts

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:10:00 +0000

If you have not yet visited Europeana, here's your chance to "study abroad." Europeana is a an impressive digital library of over 15 million items from 1500 museums, archives, libraries, and other organizations representing the cultural and scientific heritage of Europe. As described on their about us page, these items include:

Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

After conducting a basic or advanced search, search results are presented as a mix of all of these object types, but you can choose from Images, Videos, or Sounds tabs to examine those types in particular. You can also refine your search by provider, country, language, type, dates, or rights.

If you register for an account you can save your searches, save particular items, or save tags.

Safeguard Your Wireless Security

noreply@blogger.com (Elaine Paul) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Do you use wireless Internet connections at coffee shops, airports, hotels, or at home? If so you should be concerned about about the security of your personal information. Hacking is getting much easier, and new tools, such as the free Firefox add-on Firesheep, allow people with comparatively little expertise to very easily observe your online movements. A recent article in the New York Times, New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users, provides a great overview of both the threats to your private data and the actions you can take to protect yourself. I encourage you to read the article for more detailed information, but here are some important points:

HTTPS is an encryption method offered by many Web sites, but many do not provide "end-to-end" encryption, meaning that while your password may be protected as you enter a site, your privacy is vulnerable thereafter. The article points to another free Firefox extension, called HTTPS Everywhere, which makes HTTPS the default on Web sites that offer HTTPS as an encryption method. However, this only works with sites that offer HTTPS. A small lock visible in the corner of your browser or within the address bar ensures that your connection is encrypted.

A good rule of thumb noted in the article is to avoid doing anything online with sensitive data in public places. One should also take steps to bolster the security of your home wireless network, which is susceptible to hackers with inexpensive Wi-Fi antennas that can detect signals from home networks two to three miles away. It's wise to select a long and complex alphanumeric password and change the default router name of your home wireless network.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) can encrypt all wireless communications at home or in public places. There are both subscription-based and free versions, although the latter tend to provide more limited protection. If you are a member of the CU-Boulder community, you may freely use the campus VPN service. It encrypts your traffic as it is routed to the campus VPN server, and is unencrypted after that. If you are sitting in a coffee shop and connect through the CU-Boulder VPN, you have some protection from nearby prying Firesheep eyes. This is better than nothing -- it's worth noting that over a million people have downloaded Firesheep since its release just over three months ago.

Image: David Pham, iStillness, 2006. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.