Information about Google Earth will be posted here including how to access Ancient Rome, David Rumsey maps, Prado Museum.

earth.google.com/

Prado Museum

Google Earth's Virtual Prado Museum
by Doug McLean

Madrid's Prado Museum has long been a destination for art lovers. In the company of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Prado is home to countless masterpieces of western art. Unfortunately, the options for viewing its contents have always been either hopping a plane to Madrid or thumbing through printed reproductions that pale in comparison to the original works. Luckily, there's now a third option with Google Earth's Prado Museum feature, which offers ultra high resolution photos of 14 of the museum's masterpieces.

While the project isn't an acceptable substitute for seeing the works in person, it is an exceptional upgrade to the sorts of reproductions to which we've become accustomed. The images of the 14 works, which include Velázquez's Las Meninas, Goya's The Third of May 1808, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Fra Angelico's Annunciation, are 14,000 million pixels in size - that's 1,400 times larger than an image that could be captured by a standard 10 megapixel camera! The extreme resolution enables viewers to see not only every stroke of paint, but even the weave of the canvas and cracks in the varnish.

To produce these exceptional images, technicians at the Prado took over 8,200 photographs of each work over the course of three months (Google apparently footed the bill, whose total remains undisclosed.) The photos were then connected and layered using the same technology Google uses to create the incredibly detailed satellite maps for Google Earth.

www.museodelprado.es/en/ingles/

www.google.com/intl/en/landing/prado/

     The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's ArtScope is a great example of an innovative approach to bringing a museum's collection to the Web. ArtScope is a visual browsing tool comprised of a thumbnail grid displaying 3,500 works from the SFMOMA's permanent collection. The grid is zoomable, displaying a lens which can be moved over it to magnify certain areas, enabling users to view hundreds of artworks simultaneously, or just one at a time in close detail.

     More interestingly, ArtScope also provides a search tool, and below it a pane displaying information about the artwork at the center of the lens (the artwork information is displayed even if you are fully zoomed out). You can type anything into the search field: artist name, title, date, medium, keywords, etc. If any results match your search phrase, ArtScope moves the lens (maintaining the same level of zoom) to the first match. If more than one result exists for your term, a navigation bar displays the number of the result you are currently viewing, the total number of results, and arrow buttons that enable you to jump to the other matches within the grid. It's fun typing in a term like "1970" or "Acrylic on canvas", and then flying around the grid via the arrow keys to view all the results in their scattered locations.

See more information from the web site about these types of programs at the link below or just view the SFMOMA ArtScope page

db.tidbits.com/article/10212

www.sfmoma.org/projects/artscope/

From Scholars Resource:

We are very excited to announce that this viewer is now out of beta and available, AT NO COST, to everyone who has ever purchased images from Scholars Resource. 

If you are one of the more than 500 schools or museums that have licensed images from Scholars Resource over the years, you can now enjoy secure, high-resolution, online viewing of all of those images directly from our website.  Whenever you see a thumbnail (from Quick Search, Advanced Search, or My Library) with a green bar beneath it that reads "Viewer Enabled Image", simply double-click the thumbnail and a new window will open allowing you to view, zoom, and pan that image.

The best way to view your images is to click on the "My Library" menu at the top of the screen after you've logged in.  In between the Scholars Resource Sets and My Wishlists menu items, you will see a menu item customized to your institution saying something like "State University Images".  Clicking that menu item will take you to a screen listing all of the collections you have licensed from Scholars Resource.  All of the images within that collection are viewable by double-clicking the thumbnail.

If you have any questions, please contact Randi Millman-Brown for additional information about how to access these images.

You can view a newly posted You Tube video here: www.youtube.com/watch  or you can access their web site at www.scholarsresource.com and select Tutorials.

RSS feeds (an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication):

• Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format
• Help with user control and time management
• You are alerted to new content so there is no need to constantly search web sites of interest
• Feeds do not clog up email inboxes
• You can embed feeds into blogs or web pages
• You use feed reader to manage your subscriptions

Art and Architecture Resources and Copyright Resources

• A list of the top twenty Art Blogs compiled by compiled by Joy Garnett, Associate Library Manager, Robert Goldwater Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/vrc/2008/02/06/top-20-or-so-art-blogs/

• Kelly Rylance (Head of Tulane's Southeastern Architectural Archive and the Architecture Library) blog

http://southeasternarchitecture.blogspot.com/

• The world’s largest art information service

http://MutualArt.com

• CultureGrrrl Blog

http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/

• Douglass Mclennan’s Arts Beat Blog, and Arts Journal Blogs in general

feed://www.artsjournal.com/ajblogcentral/index.xml

• Art Daily

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp

• Errol Morris’ New York Times Blog

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/

• Siva Vaidhyanathan's Googlization of Everything for issues regarding copyright as well

http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/

• Copyright rebel Lawrence Lessig's blo

http://www.lessig.org/blog/

• The Art Newspaper

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/

• The Essential Vermeer Blog

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/b_form.html

• 24 Hour Museum

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/home.rss

• CAA News

http://www.collegeart.org/news/feed/

• Delicious Bookmarks from SNAP, the ARLIS library student and new professionals group

http://delicious.com/arlisnap

• Rhizome, Contemporary Art Information

http://rhizome.org/

• Dwell Magazine

www.dwell.com

Resources to keep up with technology and teaching with technology

• Academic Commons

Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology.

http://www.academiccommons.org/

• Technology in the Arts Blog, from Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Arts Management and Technology

http://www.technologyinthearts.org/

• Museum 2.0 Blog

Directed toward museums and their use of Web 2.0 technologies, but applicable to anyone interested in applying Web 2.0 to an academic environment. Explores Web 2.0 technologies deeply and incisively.

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/

• NITLE (National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education) Liberal Education Today Blog

An incredible blog devoted to issues of education in the digital age.

http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php

• New Media Consortium RSS News Feed

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is consortium of nearly 300 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.

feed://www.nmc.org/rss.xml

• New York Times Bits Blog

Stronger emphasis on business and technology, but a great place to keep track of trends and changes.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/

• Educause’s  “7 Things You Should Know About” series

Provides a concise explanation of emerging technologies and related practices.

http://www.educause.edu/7495&bhcp=1

• TASI Lightbox

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/blog/feed/

• David Silver’s Blog (Professor of New Media Studies at University of San Francisco)

http://silverinsf.blogspot.com/

• Chronicle of Higher Education

feed://feeds.chronicle.com/chronicle/news

• VRC-Blog for the Visual Resources Center at Fairfiled University: http://blog.fairfield.edu/vrc/
• All Things Visual, Visual Resources Collection, Department of Art History, The University of Chicago: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/vrc/
• Deep Focus, Visual Resources Collection, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin: http://soa.utexas.edu/vrc/blog/
• Derivative Image, Visual Resources Collection, Department of Art and Art History, University of Colorado at Boulder: http://aahvrc.blogspot.com/
• Unmasked, Visual Media Center, School of Art and Art History, University of Denver: http://duvmc.wordpress.com
• Visual Resources Center Blog, Otis College of Art and Design: https://blogs.otis.edu/vrclib/ (NB: Type this URL into your browser; for some reason the hyperlink in this document does not work.)
• Visual Resources Center Blog, Savannah College of Art and Design: http://blog.scad.edu/vrc/
• Visual Resources Library, Western Michigan University: http://visualresourceslibrary.blogspot.com/

The Art History Department's Visual Resources Collection is currently involved in an exciting new initiative with ARTstor. ARTstor is a digital library of almost one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities and the social sciences, and is available to the campus community through the Ithaca College Library's website [www.ithacalibrary.com/research/databases.php]. Beginning in Fall 2009, the VRC's own collection of almostt 20,000 digital images will be made available to the entire Ithaca College community through ARTstor's hosting program, for use by faculty and students across campus, both inside and outside the classroom. 

The hosting program allows the VRC to upload the Art History Department's teaching collection of images to ARTstor's site.  This will provide faculty with an even larger repository of images for teaching and student study, and also allow the department's images to be seamlessly integrated with ARTstor's vast collection, either via ARTstor's online presentation tools, or through its Offline Image Viewer. The VRC will continue to expand the department's digital image database and will be adding new images to the ARTstor repository on an ongoing basis.

From ARTstor:

ARTstor is working with over 90 participating institutions to host their local institutional collections on ARTstor servers. Hosted collections are available to students, faculty, and staff at participating institutions and allow them to access their own content alongside images from the ARTstor Digital Library.

The three-year Institutional Collections Pilot Program launched in 2004 and concluded fall 2007. The pilot phase demonstrated community interest in our hosting service and provided a representative sample of common visual resource collection management practices at a variety of institutions. We are now in Hosting Phase II (2008-2011) during which we continue to develop hosted collections but also focus on developing tools and workflows that more efficiently and effectively accommodate the needs of our community.

www.artstor.org