UCLA Arts Library Art and Art History Blog

Grove Art Online (including the Grove Dictionary of Art) will form the centerpiece of an important new online gateway, Oxford Art Online—the new access point for new and forthcoming Oxford art reference subscriptions and products. Oxford Art Online will offer users the ability to access and cross-search Oxford reference and Grove content in one location.Oxford Art Online includes the full text of the Grove Dictionary of Art, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, the Oxford Companion to Western Art, as well as new Grove/MoMA learning resources, a world art timeline and thematic guides, and linking with ARTstor for mutual subscribers.

The new site further allows users to search for images and image links efficiently in a single place. This enhancement permits users to easily discover the more than 5,000 images from many sources, which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Art Images for College Teaching (AICT), and the Artists Rights Society.

Do you know about the overflow shelves?

As any visitor to the Arts Library quickly learns, we have more books than physical space. Many of our books are stored in the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF); they are listed in the catalog and can be requested online. If you are looking for recently returned books, you’ll often find them on the 3rd floor shelving carts next to the elevator. We also have an “overflow” area on the 1st (bottom) floor, arranged by call number with the regular size titles on the shelves at the bottom of the stairs and the oversize titles on the left-hand shelves against the wall. These books are often in tight call number ranges where we can’t reshelve them right away. It’s a useful additional place to look when you can’t find a book on the regular shelves.

As always, if you can’t find locate materials on the shelves, ask that we put a search on the item for you. A search request can also be made online.

The latest ARTstor collection updates can be found here: http://artstor.wordpress.com/. Recent highlights include images of pre-Columbian objects and sites from the Moreen O’Brien Maser Collection (Skidmore College) and additional images from Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives. Upcoming collections include approximately 1,500 images from David Wade’s collection of islamic art. The collection has been drawn from Wade’s photographic archive of over 4,000 images, which he has made available on his website, Pattern in Islamic Art.

This year, the Arts Library replaced our older flatbed scanners with a new KIC model. The new scanner is located next to the two library photocopiers. It costs 16 cents per image to e-mail or save to a flash drive, and has a number of capabilities. It can create color or black and white scans, and goes up to 400 dpi in JPEG, PDF, or TIFF files. It also has the capability of cropping images, and scanning one or two pages from a book at a time.

The scanner is preservation friendly, so we often allow scans of materials from the Cage collection in cases where photocopying isn’t allowed. It also creates much crisper image reproductions, when a particular image photocopies poorly or needs to be created in color.

If you’d like a short tutorial on using the KIC scanner, please let me know.

We have two exhibits now in the Arts Library display cases: Recent Acquisitions - Artists’ Books and Science Fiction Movie Poster Art. Read more about these exhibits on the Arts Library webpage.

Beginning May 27,  researchers may have noted a new search box available on the Library’s webpage and in the UC Melvyl Catalog for “Next Generation Melvyl.” This is a pilot, combining the capability to search catalogs for UCLA, UC Libraries, and libraries worldwide (via WorldCat) simulteneously. It also includes some journal article indexing. There is a news item about this trial in the Spring 2008 Library News for the Faculty. Our current UCLA Catalog and the existing Melvyl Catalog will both still be up and running during the trial.

The interface for Next Generation Melvyl has different features that have not been available before in our library catalog, such as the ability to log in and write reviews, find books in Amazon.com, bookmark items using del.icio.us and other tools, and find UC books digitized by Google. It’s also important to note what is NOT included in the current pilot, most specifically “affiliated” collections like the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Ethnomusicology Archive, and the ability to search course reserve titles or sign in to personal account info. I recommend reading the “Help” documentation for Next Generation Melvyl, which explains how to search and frequently asked questions.

Finally, we want to encourage all library users to fill out the survey form on Next Generation Melvyl after giving it a try. Your feedback on this trial is very important.