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New UC Shared Images Collections are Now Available via ARTstor

October 3, 2008 Author: UC Shared ImagesCategories:

By Jan Eklund, Curator of Visual Resources, History of Art Department, UCB and Jackie Spafford, Visual Resources Curator, UCSB

Select art and architecture images from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara image collections are now available in ARTstor to all 9 ARTstor-participating UC campuses.  These collections are listed on the ARTstor home page (http://library.artstor.org) under Institutional Collections.

UC Berkeley Visual Resources Collection

The UC Berkeley Visual Resources Collection is comprised of 33,747 images from the History of Art Visual Resources Collection and the College of Environmental Design Visual Resource Center.  This collection, which contains images that span world art from the earliest cave paintings at Lascaux to contemporary art and architecture, complements the 1,000,000 images already in ARTstor.  The UC Berkeley Visual Resources Collection is particularly strong in Roman architecture, wall painting, and mosaics from southern Italy, European Renaissance and Baroque architecture, painting and prints, Chinese painting, Indian art, and 20th century European and American art and architecture.

In addition, a UC Berkeley-only Instructional Collection has also been established for images that are licensed or otherwise restricted to the Berkeley campus.

UCSB Visual Resources Collection

The first installment to the UC Santa Barbara Visual Resources Collection is comprised of the following images:

  • 19th century American art (primarily Homer and Eakins, including many studies and sketches, and photographs of their studios and students) [210 images]
  • 18th century British painting (Gainsborough, Reynolds, Fuseli, Barry) [166 images]
  • German Expressionist painting (Beckmann, Dix)  [60 images]
  • Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, post-renovation [24 images]
  • Other miscellaneous materials (e.g. 18th century Italian souvenirs from the Grand Tour)

Apart from the Kaufmann House images all of the contributions to this online collection were digitized in-house, on the VRC’s digital copystand, and all were requests for recent and current courses.

Background

This new content is the result of the collective effort of CDL’s UC Image Service, the CDL Advisory Group known as the Shared Metadata Working Group (SMWG), and Image Curators from 9 UC campuses (a.k.a. “Sliders”).  The SMWG developed a contributor’s roadmap called the Metadata Submission Guidelines (MSG) to help image managers format and map data from their local collection databases to the ARTstor Core elements.

The long-term objective of the UC Image Service is to create an online collection of images for teaching and learning comprised of content from 9 campus collections plus the licensed content managed by CDL.  These collections add unique images to the core ARTstor collections and address the immediate teaching needs of faculty.  Sharing locally created digital images systemwide will eliminate redundancy of effort, focus collection development attention on content unique to each campus, and reduce overall costs.