Irvine Adds to UC Shared Images in ARTstor

By Maureen Burns, Humanities Curator, Visual Resources Collection

UC Shared Images in ARTstor continue to grow with the addition of over 600 images from the Irvine campus, with approximately 1,200 more to be added later in May.  The new UCI collection is available, along with collections from UCB, UCSB, and UCSC, from the ARTstor home page (http://library.artstor.org) under "Institutional Collections”.

The UCI collection includes a range of academic subject areas, targeted for migration to ARTstor based upon content gaps, new areas of faculty interest, and donated images.  The largest single area represented is Contemporary art, followed by Japanese art (historical and modern, with intriguing WWII material coming soon), Ancient Roman art and architecture, American art, Medieval manuscripts, and Italian Baroque painting.  Images were selected for their instructional and scholarly value, with priority given to images specifically requested by faculty for teaching, research, and student study.;

UCI Usage of ARTstor

Recent ARTstor usage statistics indicate that UCI is one of the heaviest users of ARTstor hosted collections, having accessed almost 25,000 images since the academic year began.  Individual images were accessed and used approximately 110,000 times as part of the year-long UCI Humanities Core Course, which comprises 1,100 undergraduates and 50 faculty members and teaching assistants — the high usage due in part to the adoption of ARTstor within the curriculum.  ARTstor was used for an assignment on Weimar and Nazi Germany where the students researched, wrote, and created a Wikipedia-like document complete with images and citations.  The director of the program, Professor Julia Lupton, enthused, “ARTstor has changed my life”.  She is hoping it changes her students’ lives too.   

Background

Through UC Shared Images, campuses are strategically combining instructional images with ARTstor’s vast range of licensed images, in order to build a robust teaching collection with efficiencies for users, contributors, and the UC system.  See http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/image/ for extended information on how we are building shared image collections together.