Blog Category: Platform

We are constantly adding new content to the ARTstor Digital Library, and searches you performed in the past will very likely yield additional results in the future. Did you know you can now save search parameters to easily run the same search again?

After you perform a search, you will see an option to Save this search in the upper right of the thumbnail page of search results. Click on it, then click Save and enter a name for your saved search. You can save up to 30 searches.

To run a saved search record, click My saved searches near the search box on the front page of the Digital Library or on a search results page.

Done with a particular saved search? To delete it, click on My saved searches, then click on the X next to the search you want to delete. You’ll see a prompt asking if you want to delete it; click Yes and you’re finished.

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.

René Magritte | The Eye, c. 1932/35 | The Art Institute of Chicago Collection | © 2009 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There are many ways to find the images you’re looking for in the Artstor Digital Library; a simple keyword search will often lead you to what you’re looking for, and an advanced search will help narrow the results. Wildcards can help when you don’t remember a precise name or title, or, conversely, when you are looking for something very specific. There are only four to remember:

Artstor is pleased to serve as a founding member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) along with 50 other prominent organizations. As an outgrowth of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the NDSA is headed by the Library of Congress as “a collaborative effort among government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and businesses to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of citizens now and in the future.”

Artstor was invited to join the NDSA as the recipient of a grant through the NDIIPP program in 2007. The Library of Congress recognizes Artstor for advancing the understanding of the management of born-digital still images by encouraging its contributing photographers to use embedded metadata as a means of packaging and delivering their content. In fulfillment of the original grant, Artstor advocates the use of existing metadata structures and tools for embedding metadata and has developed an application for extracting metadata — Artstor’s Embedded Metadata Extraction Tool (EMET). EMET is an open-source software tool that will be freely available for download as a stand-alone application by December 2010. EMET will facilitate the life-cycle management of digital images and their incorporation into external databases and applications.

As a member of the NDSA, Artstor will participate in two working groups:

• Standards and Practices: Developing, following, and promoting effective methods for selecting, organizing, preserving, and serving digital content.
• Infrastructure: Developing and maintaining tools for curation and preservation, and providing storage, hosting, migration, or similar services for the long-term preservation of digital content.

Johanna Bauman, Senior Production Manager, will represent Artstor in the Standards and Practices working group. Continuing the work already begun as part of the NDIIPP grant, Bauman will bring her experience to bear in collaborating with the photographers and institutions who are sharing their images in the Artstor Digital Library. William Ying, Chief Information Officer, will participate in the Infrastructure working group. Ying has years of expertise overseeing and building the architecture of the Digital Library and is now spearheading the development of Shared Shelf, a web-based image management software service. Both the Artstor Digital Library and Shared Shelf are major infrastructure projects that will further enhance the ability of institutions to curate, share, and preserve digital content.

Artstor looks forward to continuing its work with the Library of Congress and the NDSA partners to advance the standards and practices of the digital preservation.