Discovering art on Art.sy

 Art.sy is an online art repository whose mission is “to make all the world’s art freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection”. Art.sy works with galleries and art institutions to collect art across many different movements and genres, and then users can peruse the collection.  This resource is compared to Internet radio Pandora, Pinterest, or Netflix in its ability to browse the content on Art.sy. The site was launched on October 8^th, 2012, and has over 17,000 artworks posted so far.

Art meets technology through the Art Genome Project, an organization that codes the characteristics of an artwork and creates relationships between different pieces to make searching for similar art a possibility. Users can manipulate the search filter to bring up results based on the medium. color, or size of the piece. Users may not download any of the images.

Art.sy is a good place for art appreciators to discover new art. For more information on how Art.sy is mapping art on the web, check out this article by The New York Times.

ARTtube: videos about art and design

Welcome back to the start of a new semester. We hope you’ve all had fun and relaxing summers, and are ready to start the year fresh.

To ease you into your scholarly pursuits, we present you with ARTtube. Like Youtube, ARTtube is a collection of short videos that you may find fun and addicting. Unlike Youtube, however, the videos are strictly related to art and design, and are educational in nature (sorry, no keyboard cats here).

For ARTtube, five Dutch museums (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,Gemeentemuseum, The Hague,Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, M HKA, and De Pont)  have partnered to create videos that contain interviews with leading artists, designers, and curators, sneak peaks into exhibitions, and an inside look into art restoration. The videos posted to the site are a great way to learn about the museums and their collections. To learn more about ARTtube, click here.

Europeana on Pininterest

If we’ve got you hooked on Europeana Exhibitions, you might also want to check out the visually striking collections that have resulted from Pinterest collaborations with Europeana partners. According to the June 2012 Europeana Newsletter,  Europeana has recently  teamed up with five leading European galleries, libraries, archives and museums to curate Pinterest boards using content available through Europeana. “Together with the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Varna Public Library, the Swedish National Heritage Board, The Swedish Royal Armoury and the University of Barcelona, Europeana has explored diverse themes that range from posters from the Spanish Civil War and picturesque postcards of the Black Sea, to stunning illustrations from primatologist Jordi Sabater Pi.”

ImageSearch from the University of Illinois Library: Federated search for images

EasySearch, from the University of Illinois Library,  is a component of Search Assistant, a resource discovery path for users which allows for searching across multiple electronic resources in a subject area. The Library recently added an image search function by which you can limit search results to images only.  The image search functionality searches and returns results for images from across 25 extensive online resources:  Google Images; Library of Congress Image Search; National Portrait Gallery; Flickr; USA.gov Images; V&A Images; NASA Images; Earth Science World Image Bank; Fish & Wildlife Digital Library; Getty Images; David Rumsey Map Collection; SpringerLink Images; UIUC ContentDM Digital Collections; CARLI Digital Collections; Illinois Harvest; World Digital Library; Europeana; National Park Service; National Archives; Smithsonian Institution; Emilio Segre Visual Archives; AGSL Photo Archive; Animal Science Image Gallery; and VADS.  From the EasySearch screen, select “Advanced Search,” enter your search terms, and click the box to limit the search results to images, then click “Perform Search.”

Search results with links to found images will be displayed:

Europeana Exhibitions

Europeana Exhibitions is the virtual exhibition space for Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive.  Europeana enables people to explore the digital resources of Europes museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. This virtual exhibition space showcases the content available on Europeana. Provided with extensive curatorial information, the virtual exhibits allow the user to learn and discover even more about the displayed items. All exhibitions are available in English. Translations into other languages are done with the help of volunteers, contributing partners, and sometimes professional translators. The eclectic exhibitions include Untold Stories of the First World War; Explore the World of Musical Instruments; From Dada to Surrealism; and Yiddish Theatre in London, among others.

Back from the Dead: The NYT’s Photo Archive Tumblr

Here at the Visual Resource Center we find ourselves up to our necks in close-to-forgotten images everyday. We are in good company. The Lively Morgue, the New York Times photo archive tumblr, is giving new life to images taken for the paper since 1896. They have over one hundred years of archives to work from, documenting New York City and the world throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

A glimpse into the NYT’s photo editing process

The best part is one click on a photo flips the photo over. You get to see the back of each physical image. Giving you a glimpse into the NYT’s photo selection process and insight into how these images were created and used (or almost used). Each time a photo was considered for publication it was stamped with the date it was pulled from the archive. The photographer’s name and a description of the image are inscribed on the back. Any caption that was published alongside it is pasted on the back as well.  It is fascinating look into the process of photo editing.

They just started posting this February, so we are eager to continue watching yesterday’s news unfold with the Lively Morgue.

A walk on the wild side

Cat pictures are fun and all, but sometimes they leave a bit to be desired.

If only Dali’s ocelot was a LOL(wild)cat…

We think we have found what that something is. In honor of the end of the semester and last-minute procrastination we present: Wild Pets! Who cares how easy it is to confuse a cat with a laser pointer when you can see Audrey Hepburn grocery shopping with her pet deer! a snake on a leash! or a toucan taking a bath!

We found the Wild pets photo collection on Retronaut. Organized by decade from the 1800s to WWII there is a collection of (completely decontextualized) images around nearly every theme you can think of.

Warning: this site is enough to keep even the most looming final paper at bay.