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Archive for the ‘Behind the scenes’ Category

New service: Artstor Analog

Posted in Behind the scenes, tagged on April 1, 2017| 1 Comment »

Artstor Analog

Amidst the boom in our increasingly digital lives, people are returning to analog objects. For the first time ever, sales of vinyl records have outstripped digital sales, with more than 3 million LP sales reported in 2016, and in what Publishers Weekly calls “digital fatigue,” ebook sales have plateaued. Although fatigue might not be the correct term here; according to a recent study, children–who presumably haven’t been using digital products for very long–prefer paper books to screens.

With this in mind, Artstor is proud to introduce a new service: Artstor Analog. Now your library or institution can get the same 2 million high-quality images in the Digital Library that you trust and depend on as photo slides. As a bonus, the Artstor Digital Library’s 2,000 QTVR files will be made available as fully rotatable dioramas. Among its many benefits, Artstor Analog offers the perfect solution for locations that have spotty or unreliable access to wifi.

Artstor Analog is delivered in approximately 15,000 carousel trays of 140 slides each. Because of shipping restrictions, this offer is only available in the continental United States and Canada. Please note that Artstor Analog is currently not compatible with the Offline Image Viewer.

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“Warhol’s legacy belongs to the world”–an interview with the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Michael Hermann

Posted in American Art, Behind the scenes, Collections, Modern & Contemporary Art, Paintings, Photographs on March 17, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Andy Warhol; Cow, 1966. Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Andy Warhol; Self-Portrait; 1964. Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Artstor has recently made available images of commercial art, canonical works, and thousands of personal Polaroids from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Artstor’s Damian Shand speaks to Michael Hermann, the Foundation’s director of licensing, about the collection.

Damian Shand: 35,000 images from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts have just been made available in the Artstor Digital Library. What were the origins of the collection and how difficult was it to bring all the material together for digitization?

Michael Hermann: When Warhol passed away in 1987, he left his extensive inventory of artwork to the Foundation. In order to get such a large, complicated collection cataloged, archived, photographed and digitized, the Foundation embarked on what turned out to be an ongoing 30-year project. The endeavor has been time-consuming and expensive, but as stewards of Warhol’s legacy, we feel it was necessary. Traditional means were used to document the collection while adapting to technological advancements where necessary. In the case of the 28,000 photographs now available on the Artstor Digital Library, we used a crowd-sourcing model. The original 28,000 Warhol photographs were donated to over 180 college and university museums and galleries who in turn documented the artworks and sent the high-resolution digital images back to us.

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Addressing the unaddressed: Tuskegee University’s Hidden Audio Collections, 1957-1971

Posted in Behind the scenes, Case Study, Photographs, Shared Shelf Commons on March 16, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks at the TCA meeting, 1957. Courtesy of the Tuskegee University Archives, P.H. Polk Collection, 2017.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks at the TCA meeting, 1957. Courtesy of the Tuskegee University Archives, P.H. Polk Collection, 2017.

Tuskegee University Archives recently released new recordings from the Tuskegee Civic Association records that feature prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. These speeches, addressing the Tuskegee community, fill in historical gaps to illuminate the relationships between leaders and their constituents.

The collection was digitized from reel-to-reel tape under the care of university archivist Dana Chandler and made available through funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Council of Independent Colleges. The recordings are freely available to listen to on Shared Shelf Commons.

Artstor staff members Evan Towle and Karyn Anonia spoke with Chandler about his work.

ET: First, can you speak a little about your history with the Archives at Tuskegee?

DC: I’m in my eleventh year. I’d first visited in 1972—my parents brought us down here to see Carver’s laboratory, and I fell in love with the place then. I did not ever expect to work here. The opportunity kind of fell into my lap, and I have been able to, I think, develop the Archives into a viable place for researchers to come from the US and all around the world to work on the materials to fill in some blanks that have been evident for a long time about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the history of Tuskegee as a whole, as well as the work of African Americans, how successful they really were during the time of Jim Crow Laws and laws of segregation.

When you think about Tuskegee, you think about George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington. You think about the Tuskegee Airmen, and maybe something called the Syphilis Study, which did not happen here on the campus. But it is much more than those things. The first Extension Agent to the US Federal Government came from Tuskegee—not just the first black agent, but the first Extension Agent came from Tuskegee University—the first African American Hospital in Alabama; the first school to offer a four-year degree in nursing in Alabama; the first African American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics, Alice Coachman Davis, went to Tuskegee. And believe me, I could go on and on ad nauseam about the stuff that’s here.

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Artstor searches highlight women

Posted in Behind the scenes, Discovery on December 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Leonardo da Vinci; Mona Lisa; 1503-1506, Musée du Louvre. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com
Unknown artist (Gravettian culture), Palaeolithic; Venus of Willendorf; circa 30,000-25,000 BCE; Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com
Edouard Manet; Olympia; 1863-1865; Musée d’Orsay. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

In in the vast, global virtual museum of the Artstor Digital Library, women are rising to the top. Our recent use statistics reveal that portraits and likenesses of the fairer sex (your interpretation…) dominate. The subject of women prevailed among the top 20 hits, with, you guessed it, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, c. 1505, his serene queen, as number one (more than 12,000 views), followed closely by the Venus of Willendorf, c. 30,000-25,000 B.C.E., and Manet’s Olympia, 1863, each a distinctive icon of a particular era.

Among our fine and plentiful selections from the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Warhol’s silkscreens of Marilyn, 1967, arguably the modern Mona Lisa, topped the charts, prevailing over favorites by Pieter Bruegel I, Caspar David Friedrich, Jan van Eyck and Hans Holbein the Younger. At MoMA, another version, the Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, figured among the top ten, and its shimmering ground recalls so many Byzantine and early Italian Madonnas, like Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, c. 1310, one of the most frequented images across all of our collections.

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The Top Ten Posts of 2015

Posted in Behind the scenes, Organization on December 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Georges Lepape (illustrator); Paul Poiret (costume designer), “Les Jardins de Versailles – Costume de Paul Poiret dans le goût Louis XIV”, 1913. Image and catalog data provided by Allan T. Kohl, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Lepape: © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, Poiret: © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
John James Audubon, Black-Tailed Hare, 1841. Image and original data: Saint Louis Art Museum
Byron Company, R.H. Macy & Co., 34th St. & Broadway, 1913. Museum of the City of New York

We want to thank you for your continued interest in the Artstor Blog. With more than 244,000 visits, you’ve made 2015 our biggest year yet!

In case you missed any of them, here are our top ten most popular posts from the year:

  1. Hopping through cultures: the rabbit in art Our gallery of rabbits and hares through the ages was our biggest draw, jumping way past its Easter theme.
  2. Game of Thrones and the House of Artstor No surprise–our readers are as hooked on the show as we are.
  3. No longer scandalous: Manet in America It turns out the artist who shocked Paris did not raise eyebrows in New York or Boston.
  4. Shopping paradise: Émile Zola and the world’s first department store Inspired by another TV show, we delved into the history of the department store.
  5. The secret names of Italian Renaissance artists Bronzino is a nickname that means “the bronze one,” referring to his dark complexion. There’s lots more where that came from.
  6. The art of looking slowly Museumgoers spend an average of just 17 seconds looking at an individual artwork. Meet the man who wants to change that.
  7. Artstor Arcades: Introducing our new crowdsourcing software We’ve made cataloging fun–and addictive!
  8. The infinite variety of artists’ books We drew up a selection from two collections that cover the range of this surprisingly diverse genre.
  9. A missing piece? Coordinating cataloging controls in the networked world Artstor’s president on the similarities between the cattle business in the 19th century and the Digital Humanities today.
  10. #thatdress Was it  black and blue, or white and gold? The debate might be over but our gallery of interesting dresses lives on.

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A missing piece? Coordinating cataloging controls in the networked world

Posted in Behind the scenes, Organization, tagged , on June 30, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Louis Lafon, Railyard Scene, c. 1880. Image from The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College.

Louis Lafon, Railyard Scene, c. 1880. Image from The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College.

By James Shulman, Artstor President

When I was in Fort Worth for the ARLIS conference this spring, I learned a lot about the history of the cattle business in the post-Civil War period. The cities of the East and the West were hungry for Texas beef, but there was no practical way to get it to them. The age of the cowboy took place because a particular kind of soul was needed to lead the herds north from Fort Worth through exposed frontier to the train yards of Kansas City. But when the railroad reached Fort Worth (in 1886), everyone quickly adapted. The cattlemen soon realized that they could do more than load their cattle on trains at Fort Worth, and entrepreneurs raised capital from wealthy Boston investors to build “processing” plants at the Fort Worth rail yards. The moral of this story (and I’m sorry to have turned off the vegetarians in the reading audience) is simply that everyone involved in the process was more than happy to take advantage of infrastructure as it became available.

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Deadline extended: Become a student Artstor Ambassador!

Posted in Behind the scenes, Organization on June 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Hans Holbein the Younger | Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve ('The Ambassadors') | 1533 | The National Gallery, London | Photograph ©The National Gallery, London

Hans Holbein the Younger | Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’) | 1533 | The National Gallery, London | Photograph ©The National Gallery, London

We are looking for students in all concentrations to become the voice of Artstor on their campus for the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 semesters, and we’ve extended the deadline until June 30th!

The selected participants will get to work with professionals from Artstor’s New York office to develop valuable business skills; learn how to create effective social media campaigns with campus-wide and international exposure; network at Artstor events with peers from institutions across the country; and add Artstor to their resume and receive a certificate of completion at the end of the program. Plus they get to take part in special events and win prizes!

To apply, fill out this questionnaire by June 30, 2015. We will reach out to selected candidates for a brief interview. Applications will be reviewed as they are received and selected candidates will be notified by July.

We encourage administrators and faculty members to pass this on to their students.

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