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Blog Category: Organization

March 28, 2013

Artstor to help launch the Digital Public Library of America

Yupik Eskimo | Mask: The Bad Spirit of the Mountain | late 19th century | Dallas Museum of Art

Yupik Eskimo | Mask: The Bad Spirit of the Mountain | late 19th century | Dallas Museum of Art

Artstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide access to more than 10,000 high-quality images from six leading museums.

As part of its collaboration with Artstor, the DPLA will aggregate and make available data records and links to images from six major American museums: the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection), the Walters Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open Artstor, a new Artstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public domain images.

The DPLA is a large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries, and archives to build a digital library platform to make America’s cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point. As part of its two-year Digital Hubs Pilot Project, the DPLA is working with several large digital content providers—including the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution—and seven state and regional digital libraries to make digitized content from their online catalogs easily accessible to all. The DPLA will celebrate the groundbreaking work of hundreds of librarians, innovators, and other dedicated volunteers in its collective effort to build the first national digital library platform on April 18 at the Boston Public Library.

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February 26, 2013

If I Knew Then What I Know Now

Pantheon; Interior view #1 | 118-126 CE | QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (Columbia University) | Visual Media Center; learn.columbia.edu

Pantheon; Interior view #1 | 118-126 CE | QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (Columbia University) | Visual Media Center; learn.columbia.edu

By Dana Howard

True confession: I was a sporadic—and inattentive—user of the Artstor Digital Library. My high school was a fairly early adopter of Artstor. I used it a lot on those early years, but as I had more and more of my slides “in the can,” I stopped paying attention to the changes taking place in the Digital Library.

I would periodically run to Artstor when I was asked to do presentations at the last minute, (I found the ability to do a quick download of Image Groups to PowerPoint very helpful), but for the most part I was too busy to explore new tools and new collections as they were announced. I think I was typical for a high school user; I was busy teaching and felt constantly bombarded with new resources elsewhere.

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February 25, 2013

Remembering Caleb Smith

Caleb Smith and Cassy Juhl, Ginkaku-ji in Kyoto, May 19, 2010

Caleb Smith and Cassy Juhl, Ginkaku-ji in Kyoto, May 19, 2010

ARTstor celebrates the life and work of Caleb Smith, Director of the Media Center of Art History at Columbia University, who passed away suddenly on February 11, 2013 at the young age of 42. He was a generous and kind friend, colleague, and scholar.

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January 25, 2013

How the Artstor Digital Library weathered the storm

John Marin | Hurricane | 1944 | Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art; imamuseum.org | © 2008 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

John Marin | Hurricane | 1944 | Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art; imamuseum.org | © 2008 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

By Mary Finer, Project Coordinator

Artstor is in the goal-setting time of the year, and expanding our disaster recovery efforts is high on the Technology department’s list—especially after last year. We’re in pretty good shape though. While sites such as Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post were down during “Superstorm” Sandy, the Artstor Digital Library remained accessible.

Artstor has servers in Manhattan and Denver, and each location has backups of each other in case disaster strikes. In New York our servers are at 60 Hudson Street, a.k.a. “the Hub,” a 1.8 million square foot facility where the Internet’s transatlantic cable lands. It used to be the center of Western Union’s telegraph network when it was built in the late 1920s, and is now the Grand Central Station of the Internet.

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October 2, 2012

Celebrating the digital collection builders of New York City

Artstor works with more than 250 international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists’ estates to share 1.4 million images in the Digital Library. To celebrate our local partners – and to provide an opportunity for like-minded professionals to discuss their objectives and challenges – we held a reception for New York City’s digital collection builders at the beautiful Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s garden in midtown.

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June 18, 2012

The winners of the Artstor Travel Award 2012

Congratulations to the five winners of this year’s Artstor Travel Awards! They will each receive $1,500 to be used for their teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year. The winning essays are:

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June 1, 2012

Announcing the winners of the Artstor Travel Award 2012!

Accessory Set (Hat), ca. 1925 | Makers: Dobbs (opera hat, right), Scott & Company, (top hat, left) | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image and original data from the Brooklyn Museum.

Congratulations to the five winners of this year’s Artstor Travel Awards! They will each receive $1,500 to be used for their teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year.

Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted an essay. As in previous years, our committee had a very difficult time choosing just five winners, and we are impressed by the wonderfully creative ways that our users integrate the images in the Artstor Digital Library into their teaching and research.

The Artstor Travel Awards 2012 winning essays are:

  • Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss, Memorial Art Gallery of University of Rochester: Art at the Bedside: Exploring the Healing Potential of the Visual Arts
  • Dr. Martha Hollander, Hofstra University: Vermeer’s Robe: The Dutch and Japan, 1600-1800
  • Katherine Murrell, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design: REPRESENT: Women Artists in the Western Tradition
  • Amelia Nelson, Kansas City Art Institute: Silkworms in the Library
  • Margaret Teillon, Wachovia Education Resource Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Enhancing Children’s Literature with Artstor Images
The winning essays and accompanying images will be posted in the blog in the near future.

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March 9, 2012

Travel Awards 2012: call for entries

Francesco Pesellino | King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land, ca. 1445-1450 | Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute | Image and data was provided by Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

The Artstor Travel Awards are back! Five winners will receive $1,500 each in support of educational and scholarly activities, such as flying to a conference. The contest is open to graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field.

To apply, submit one or more Artstor image groups and a single accompanying essay that creatively and compellingly demonstrates why the image group(s) is useful for teaching, research, or scholarship. The five winning submissions will be determined by Artstor staff and featured in the Digital Library.

Need some inspiration? Check out last year’s winners.

[Please note that this award is not intended to sponsor new photography for the Artstor Digital Library.]

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October 26, 2011

Artstor Awarded IMLS Grant for Searching and Social Tagging

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a three-year grant of $413,378 to support a project investigating and evaluating ways of improving library and museum searching and social tagging by presenting users with thesauri, taxonomies, and other structured vocabularies as a way to discover relevant content. The results will ultimately be useful to a wide range of museum and library users and can be directly applied by library and museum service providers and search engine designers. The project consists of lead applicant Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology as well as Artstor, University at Buffalo, Getty Research Institute, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Visit the IMLS website for more details.

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May 16, 2011

Winners of the Artstor Travel Award 2011

Congratulations to the five winners of this year’s Artstor Travel Awards! They will each receive $1,500 to be used for their teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year.

Artstor would like to thank all of the participants for their wonderful submissions. We are very inspired by the ways our community teach and study with the Digital Library, and we have learned from you new ways in which we can grow our collections and services. Your continued use and support of the Digital Library in your daily work is vital to the Artstor mission.

We received more than 100 submissions that revealed the many creative ways that scholars, curators, educators, and students at universities, community colleges, museums, K-12 schools, and libraries are integrating Artstor Digital Library image collections into their interdisciplinary teaching and research.

 

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