Digital Collections News

ARTstor Collection Additions

ARTstor has recently added many items and collections to its database. Here are a few:

-more than 40 images from 8x10 Rothko transparencies
-more than 300 Lichtensteins
-an additional 2,848 images from the Scala Archives (including major Italian works)
-the first 600 ARTstor images from the Franklyn Furnace Archives
-an additional 14,000 archaeological images of Mayan excavations from the Carnegie Institution of Washington

And there is still more to come! ARTstor is currently working with Harvard to digitize over 3,500 Renaissance and Baroque images. They are also collaborating with Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi of Great Britain and the National Monuments Record to add 18,000 medieval stained glass images to the collection.

For more ARTstor updates, you can visit the ARTstor blog at http://www.artstor.org/blog or sign up for RSS feeds at http://artstor.wordpress.com/feed.

New ARTstor Platform Coming Soon

Anyone who finds ARTstor a bit daunting or difficult to use may be in luck: they plan to unveil a Beta version of a new ARTstor Digital Library in the next few months, with a full release following later in 2008. The new Digital Library will run on AJAX, rather than the Java thin client platform currently used. This means the Library will be integrated into your web browser, rather than run as a separate Java client. In addition, ARTstor promises the new version includes some significant improvements. For one, the navigation menus have been streamlined, searching and browsing have been highlighted, permanent URLs for bookmarking images. The Digital Library will also feature My ARTstor, which should make it easier for users to navigate to their saved links and image groups.

For those of you who prefer the ARTstor Digital Library you already know, don't worry. The current version and new version will be simultaneously available. Basic functionality in each version will be the same as well.

PicLens, Silverlight and Hard Rock memorabilia

There are new online interactive media viewers popping up everywhere! PicLens ,for example, turns your browser into an interactive 3D image viewer. It only works with some websites -- sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Google Images -- but they also have information on how to enable your own website for PicLens. I was very excited to see that PicLens is now compatible with YouTube! Even though I get a little dizzy in this visual environment, it is refreshing to be able to interact with large quantities of digital content with ease (and fun). It seems most successful with sites like Flickr, where people post hundreds of photos with little descriptive information. The social potential of sites like Flickr is limited in this view, as comments and links to other users are not viewable here, but you can easily get back to the normal view. The PicLens view is great for searching and viewing images on the internet and has potential for presenting image groupings as well.

You have to install a Silverlight plugin to view the Hard Rock Memorabilia digital collection. Microsoft recently announced Deep Zoom, which allows for zooming in on high resolution images without waiting for large files to download. Read more about it here, and be sure to check out Elvis Presley's tiger-embroidered pants suit.