ARTstor Goes Mobile!

ARTstor registered users can now access the ARTstor image database through the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Read-only features such as searching, browsing, zooming, and viewing are available in the mobile format. Log-on to ARTstor from your mobile device by going to http://library.artstor.org in the Safari browser. For more details, visit the ARTstor Help page at http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/ARTstor_Mobile.

Media Vault Program Ending

The three-year, grant-funded UC Berkeley Media Vault Program comes to an end this month. Although the program officially comes to an end very soon, they will be extending online access to our Portfolio website through the end of January 2011. At the end of January, the site will be removed and you may no longer access our collection images through this portal.

A new service, dubbed the Research Hub (was originally named Media Hub), will be introduced soon. The Research Hub team is currently working on pricing and terms of service for their limited release this fall. For the most recent news (as of this date) on the program, see their news site.

Super High-Resolution Images from the Uffizi Gallery

Have you every wanted to see Caravaggio’s Bacchus so close up that you could see the dirt under his fingernails? Or see the individual characters on the pages of text in Leonardo’s Annunciation?

Well, now you can, thanks to HaltaDefinizione’s propriety technology Real High Definition (RHD). HaltaDefinizione is an Italian company with an agreement to photograph 24 masterworks from the Uffizi Gallery’s collection. Leonardo’s Annunciation, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, Caravaggio’s Bacchus and Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleonore of Toledo (1545) are some of the works available for viewing on the HaltaDefinizione website.

These images are of such high-resolution that you can zoom into the image to see every little brushstroke and crack of the paint. In fact, their image of Botticelli’s Primavera is so high-res that it contains 28 billion pixels which is about 3000 times the resolution of a typical digital camera.

You can read more about it in the posting on Wired.com, featuring commentary by UC Berkeley’s Associate Professor of Art History, Todd P. Olson.

Featured Collection: The British Museum

The British Museum has over 500,000 of their collection images available through their online database. The images are available in download sizes of 1024 pixels wide, or greater, and are approved for non-commercial education use.

In addition, the British Museum offers high-resolution images (2500 pixels wide) free of charge, that can be used for non-commercial publications with a print-run of less than 4,000. You may order up to 100 of these high-resolution images per month. See their website for more information on obtaining their high-res images.

Download online videos

If you would like to show an online video in a lecture but are afraid you won't have reliable Internet access, it might be a good idea to download that video to your hard drive first. You can quickly and easily download videos from sites such as YouTube or Google Videos by using a free service at http://en.savefrom.net/.

http://en.savefrom.net/ will give you the option to download the streaming video in a variety of formats such as  MOV, MP4 or WMV. Just paste the video's URL into the website's search box & then hit 'download' and select the file format you desire. You can then run the video directly from your hard drive or insert it into a PowerPoint presentation.

New ARTstor collections

Several new collections are available in ARTstor. The Metropolitian Museum of Art contributed 900 images of art and architecture from along the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route. Bryn Mawr College has made a collection of 8,000 images of architectural monuments and plans of archaeological sites available. You may also find new images of the architecture of Le Corbusier from Dalhousie University. Photographer and art historian, Barbara Anello, contributed 750 images of art, architecture, and culture of Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Morocco.

MS Office 2008 file converter

If you are a Mac user with an older version of MS Office (e.g. 2004 or older) you may find that you are unable to open files created with MS Office 2008. This is especially true if you are trying to use the new batch download feature in ARTstor, which creates PPT 2008 files.

A converter plug-in from Microsoft should resolve these file conversion issues. Follow this link, and download the plug-in at the bottom of the page where it says 'Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2'.