UCLA Arts Library Architecture and Design Blog

The Smithsonian Libraries, Archives and Museums have worked together and created the Collections Search Center (http://collections.si.edu), a one-stop-searching center for the public for Smithsonian Institution collections.  This fast growing Collections Search Center currently contains 2.3 million records with 280,000 online media such as images, sound files, videos, and online collections. 

Collections are contributed by:

• Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• National Air and Space Museum
• National Museum of American Indians
• National Museum of Natural History
• National Portrait Gallery
• National Postal Museum
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Archives at the National Museum of the American Indian
• Archives Center at National Museum of American History
• Archives of American Art
• Archives of American Gardens
• Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives
• Human Studies Film Archives
• National Air and Space Museum Archives Division
• National Anthropological Archives
• Smithsonian American Art Museum Photo Archives
• Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies
• Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
• Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries
• Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory - Chandra X-ray Observatory

The Society of Architectural Historians announced that on November 4, 2009, 10,000 digital photographs and QTVRs from the SAHARA Editors’ Choice collection will be integrated into the ARTstor Digital Library.  For institutions that subscribe to ARTstor (such as the University of California), this will enrich the substantial architecture holdings already in the ARTstor Digital Library and provide seamless access to both collections.   All photographs and QTVRs contributed to SAHARA still will be available to Society of Architectural Historians members through the SAHARA site.

SAHARA is a digital image archive developed by the Society of Architectural Historians in collaboration with ARTstor to allow SAH members either to upload their own digital photographs and QTVR panoramas to a shared online archive or to download images from the archive for teaching and research.  The SAHARA collection is being built for all who study, interpret, photograph, design and preserve the built environment worldwide.

The Magic Lantern!
From Victorian Vision To Modern Media

From the Collection of UCLA Design | Media Arts Professor Erkki Huhtamo

October 21 - December 11, 2009

The magic lantern played an important role in visual education and entertainment for centuries. Introduced soon after the mid-seventeenth century, it became a staple of the curiosity cabinets of savants and was brought to the “common people” by itinerant showmen. In the nineteenth century the magic lantern show developed into a specialized profession and big business, and countless magic lanterns and slides were produced both for professional and domestic use.

Featuring magic lanterns, lantern slides, and other related objects from the extensive private collection of UCLA Design | Media Arts Professor Erkki Huhtamo, this exhibit demonstrates how the magic lantern show, typical of the Victorian era, opened ways for modern society and culture as well.

In connection with the exhibit, the Department of Design | Media Arts will present a Halloween Magic Lantern Show in the EDA auditorium in the Broad Art Center on Thursday, October 29, at 6 p.m. It will be presented by the American Magic Lantern Theater of Connecticut, the only professional group giving authentic magic lantern shows in the United States. Admission is free, and no reservations are required; seating is on a first-come basis.

You will now see an icon (  ) in the ARTstor Image Viewer that allows you to zoom in and save a particular detail of an image to an image group. With this new feature, full views and multiple details of an image may appear together in any given group, as well as be exported for use in the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) or PowerPoint. This ability to save and share multiple views of the same image helps to meet the many teaching, research, and presentation needs of the ARTstor community.

Nested folders

ARTstor has also enhanced the functionality of folders in the Digital Library. Instructor-level users can now create nested sub-folders that can be moved easily from one folder to another by dragging and dropping. For example, you may build draft versions of your image groups in a private folder and simply drag them to a public folder when they are ready to be shared. The addition of nested folders allows you to organize ARTstor content in ways that are meaningful and intuitive to you.

Need Help? 

Consult the ARTstor in 3 minutes Training Videos http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Training_Options or refer to the ARTstor Help topics at: http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/ARTstor_Help_Topics

Great news: UCLA now has access to excellent quality architectural images from Archivision, through ARTstor (listed under ‘Institutional Collections’), thanks to the UC-wide project, UC Shared Images.

Here is the description of what is currently available to UC users:

THE BASE COLLECTION (16,000 images)
The Library’s Base Collection is a core architecture collection representing major Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, 18th & 19th Century and Modern sites. The focus here is the Italian Renaissance and Baroque and Modern architecture, especially the work of Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier. The collection also includes gardens & parks, city skylines, cityscapes and public art as well as other design related topics, such as C.R. Mackintosh furniture drawings, etc.

ADDITION MODULE ONE (6,000 images)
The first Addition Module completes our holdings on Renaissance and Baroque Rome not included in the Base Collection. It also contains all of our Ancient Egyptian material (close to 2000 images – this was our major photographic campaign of 2004). The collection also holds all of our Islamic material in Egypt, as well as overview sets on Cairo, Aswan and Luxor. Many contemporary sites are also included, especially those in Vancouver, Seattle, Boston and Montréal.

ADDITION MODULE TWO (6,000 image)
Module Two contains all of our Andrea Palladio material (over 700 images, of which 299 are Scamozzi etchings illustrating plans, sections and elevations of Palladio’s work); all of the Hector Guimard collection (229 images); Fascist architecture in Italy; most of our holdings from London England; and the balance of our Ancient Greek and Bramante material not contained in the first two modules. The Module also includes all of our Islamic architecture in Turkey plus contemporary architecture in Florida, New York, Montreal, and Washington DC. The Module is rounded out with 300 exquisite new (May 2007) photographs of the exterior and interiors of Mackintosh’s Hill House.

More information about Archivision is available at: http://archivision.com/educational/overview.html.

More information about UC Shared Images is at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/image/index.html

Images from Gazette du Bon Ton (Minneapolis College of Art and Design)
The Minneapolis College of Art and Design has contributed images of early 20th-century French fashion plates from La Gazette du Bon Ton to the ARTstor Digital Library.

Wilfried Wang: Modern Architecture (University of Texas at Austin)
ARTstor has collaborated with the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin to make available 458 images of modern European and American architecture in the Digital Library.

More images from the Contemporary Art (Larry Qualls Archive) collection
More than 4,600 additional images from Larry Qualls’ archive of contemporary art are now available in the ARTstor Digital Library. This most recent release includes contemporary art exhibited in New York City galleries during Summer 2002, Fall 2002, Winter 2003, and Spring 2003.

Mexican architecture and urban design Pre-Colombian through the 20th century
ARTstor and the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin have collaborated to share more than 5,700 images from the Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design.

Christopher Long: Central European Architecture (University of Texas at Austin) collection
ARTstor has collaborated with the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin to distribute more than 200 images of Central European architecture, including works by Josef Chochol, Karl Ehn, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Joseph Gocr, Josef Hoffmann, Pavel Jank, Emil Krlcek, Adolf Loos, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Otto Wagner, among others.

Additional images from ART on File
ARTstor has partnered with ART on FILE to document contemporary architecture in the Netherlands and Scandinavia including buildings, built-environment projects and landscape architecture.

Architectural photography from Ezra Stoller
ARTstor is collaborating with Esto Photographics to digitize and distribute images of modern architecture from the archive of Ezra Stoller (1915 – 2004). There are now more than 7,600 images from his archive in the Digital Library.

What is ARTstor? ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. In ARTstor you can:

• Browse content by collection, classification, or geography
• Search content by keyword or advanced search terms (e.g., date and geographic origin)
• Sort search results by date, creator, or title
  View images and image data
• Zoom in on and pan images for greater detail
• Print and save images and related data to other hardware (e.g. CD, memory stick, hard drive)
• Create groups of images for later retrieval and presentation
• Organize image groups into shared folders
• Direct other ARTstor users to images or image groups
• Upload personal images and sound files to the ARTstor platform
• Export images and image groups to ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) presentation tool
• Save citations for images or image groups, and email or print these, as well as export them directly into EndNote, ProCite, RefWorks, Reference Manager, or a text file.

Visit the ARTstor Blog
Visit the ARTstor Blog for access to all current and archived announcements. http://www.artstor.org/blog

ARTstor has released a new feature to Instructor-level users that streamlines the process of exporting images and descriptive data from ARTstor. You may now export image groups to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 in just a few clicks. When viewing an image group, look for the Export to PowerPoint icon (  ) in the utility bar or click Tools > Export to PowerPoint. The resulting PowerPoint file will include:

• A title slide displaying the name of the image group.
• Individual slides for each image in the group, in the order in which they appear in the image group.
• ARTstor descriptive data for each image, appearing in the notes field of each slide.
• Embedded hyperlinks in each image that will launch the ARTstor Image Viewer when clicked in presentation mode (requires web access).

ARTstor has instituted certain export limits during the Beta period and will be evaluating the performance of this new feature over the fall semester. For more information, visit ARTstor Help or contact User Services at userservices@artstor.org.

Arts Library hours for Fall Quarter, valid Thursday September 24 through Friday December 11 will be as follows:

Mondays and Thursdays: 10:00 am-8:00 pm

Tuesdays and Wednesdays: 10:00 am-6:00 pm

Fridays: 10:00 am-4:00 pm

Saturdays: closed

Sundays: 1:00 pm-5:00 pm

Based at the UCLA Arts Library, this blog is maintained by the Architecture, Design, and Digital Services Librarian. Its goal is to provide faculty, students, and interested researchers with ongoing library and archives-related news and announcements, tips, and information about available resources and services. Comments and questions on posts are welcomed, as well as ideas for new topics.