Finding and teaching with images using ARTstor

By Sherri Berger, Digital Special Collections Program Coordinator

As the new semester ramps up, we thought it was a good time to remind you about the wealth of digital images available on ARTstor.  New content and features are always being added.  Here are a few highlights.

Millions of images

ARTstor is a digital library of images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences.  These include campus-built collections (UC Shared Images), as well as several licensed resources and the ARTstor core collection. Together they amount to more than 1.75 million images—a number that continues to grow with the ongoing addition of new collections spanning a range of topics and eras.

Just some of the subjects include: African-American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, Asian Studies, Foreign Languages and Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, Music History, Native American Studies, and Women’s Studies.  ARTstor’s Collections by Topic page lists all of these subjects and more, with detailed help guides for finding images in each area.

New Functionality and Training Materials

ARTstor’s simple interface and advanced tools enable UC faculty and students to search across collections, as well as view, present, and manage the images that interest them.

Teaching with ARTstor is now even easier, thanks to a new export feature.  Instructor-level users can batch-export images—and their metadata—to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 in just a few clicks.  Faculty can quickly assemble class presentations, without cutting and pasting or retyping image information.  The Visual Resources Collection at UC Berkeley has created a short instructional video demonstrating the batch export.

Additionally, ARTstor offers online training sessions to familiarize new users and help returning users sharpen their skills.  “Introduction to ARTstor” provides an overview for all users, while “Presenting with ARTstor” and “Teaching with ARTstor” are designed especially for faculty and graduate student instructors.  The sessions are free of charge to members of all institutions that subscribe to ARTstor.  See the winter 2010 schedule for a list of upcoming trainings.