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.

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.

In summer 2008, the Bancroft Library will return to its original location, the Doe Library Annex, from its temporary quarters in downtown Berkeley.  The state-mandated seismic retrofitting of its building, as well the much-needed upgrading of its facilities, is planned for completion by the end of spring 2008.  The Library will be closed for approximately five months during this move, and then will once again be open to the public.

Bancroft’s normal open hours will be maintained this spring for the preparation of the move.  From May 23, 2008 to mid-Fall 2008, Bancroft will be closed to the public in order to move its collections.  Other Bancroft Library programs affected by the move include the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the Regional Oral History Office, the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, and the University Archives.

For more information and updates about the move, please visit the Bancroft website at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info/move/ or call (510) 642-3781.