Category: Online Resources

Online Resource | Jewish Museum of Australia launches digitised collection

Always excitied to share collection digitistion news, and the Jewish Museum of Australia (based in Melbourne) has recently launched a new website that includes online access to around 3000 objects from their collection, with plans for mroe to be added. We couldn’t be more excited to launch our digital collection, along with a very smart looking new website. Senior Curator and Collection Manager Juliette Hanson (pictured) says: The Internet Museum (IMu) is a very exciting and important project for the Jewish Museum. It will increase the level of access to our collection immeasurably by opening it up to international audiences, as well as allowing local researchers and visitors to engage with the collection before and after their visit to the Museum. Our remarkable collection contains over 20,000 objects and stories. For the past year the collections team have been busily working to make…

Online Resource | Fifty artworks from the Monash University Collection

Monash University Museum of Art has published a new writing project Fifty artworks from the Monash University Collection. This online publication presents a suite of specially commissioned texts by art historians, curators and artists. From Helen Hughes, Research Curator MUMA’s new writing project, Fifty artworks from the Monash University Collection, presents a suite of specially commissioned texts by art historians, curators and artists. In inviting these responses, our desire was to open the Collection up to a broad range of voices and perspectives – from those who have had close contact with it over five decades, to those new to it. The fifty selected artworks include some of the most well-known and seen of the Collection, as well as others that deserve greater attention. Without being too prescriptive, the selection reflects the material, conceptual, cultural and temporal diversity and scope of…

Online Resource | Morgan Library and Museum launch new website and improved access to digitised collection

The Morgan Library and Museum has launched a new website which offers vastly improved access to its digitised collections. The images of the collection are high quality and can be zoomed in to see fine detail. In many cases the backs of objects have also been photographed. Some objects, such as the ancient seals, have been photographed in three dimensions and can be rotated. As well as an important collection of Rembrandt drawings the Morgan also hold a large number of illuminated manuscripts, music manuscripts and rare books. Some aspects of the search are a bit basic (it is easy to do a keyword search, but more general browsing is challenging), as are the rather stark records, but the press release indicates that this is part of an ongoing process so these will no doubt be updated at some point.…

Online Resource | Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery Digitised Collection

Thomas William Roberts, Ulverstone Beach, 1931, oil on canvas on composition board. Purchased with funds from the Launceston Museum and Art Gallery Foundation, 2008 (detail).

The Queen Victoria Art Gallery in Launceston has announced that they have digitised 684 paintings and made them available online. The collection strengths are described on their website as Tasmanian Colonial Art (this collection documents the artistic heritage of Tasmania through paintings, works on paper and sculpture), Modern and Contemporary Australian Art (this collection documents the history of Australia’s postcolonial art of aesthetic value through paintings, works on paper, sculpture and multi-media, and, International Art (a small but significant collection of international paintings and works on paper). The online collection is mainly focused on Australian art, with a small number of European paintings. It is great to see regional museums being supported to digitise collections that are often less well-known compared to our national and state galleries, and this will no doubt be a useful tool for a variety of researchers. On a quick…

Online Resource | The Artist’s Handbook from Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis/Routledge have put together a range of popular and important articles on art history and art theory published in the various journals that they publish. This collection has been called ‘The Artist’s Handbook’ (why not the  The Art Historian’s Handbook?) and is divided into four sections on Genres, Eras, Icons (actually ‘Artists’ really) and How-to (Materials and Techniques probably a better name). These categories (and the descriptions of them) are all rather basic*, but the positive aspect of this initiative is that all articles included in the collections have apparently been made open access to read online or to download. From a quick scan the collection seems to include several hundred articles from important journals, making this a useful collection for anyone who doesn’t have ready access to online journal databases. You can browse the collection here.   *…

Online Resource | University of Melbourne Cultural Collections

The University of Melbourne has launched a new website dedicated to providing information about the objects in the university’s various collections, and information/suggestions on how these might be used in teaching across a variety of disciplines. The website is (unsurprisingly) primarily aimed at people teaching and studying at the University of Melbourne, but all information is readily available to anyone and the high-quality reproductions, potted histories of the objects, and links to further reading are likely to be of interest to a broader audience. You can browse the objects included here http://library.unimelb.edu.au/teachingobjects#home From the website: Teaching with unique collections provides resources, an online showcase, and a virtual setting for teaching and learning in many disciplines. It features objects, books, manuscripts, works of art and other items from the university’s Prints, Rare Books and Rare Music collections, Grainger Museum,  University of Melbourne Archives and Ian Potter Museum…

Online Resource | MoMA exhibition archive

The Museum of Modern Art has begun making their exhibition history archives available online. The collection - which ranges from 1929 until the present - includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. The images are not public domain so you will still need to seek permission to publish them, but the online, searchable archive is still an important resource for researchers. Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/arts/design/moma-will-make-thousands-of-exhibition-images-available-online.html?_r=0 You can search online here. From the MoMA website The Museum of Modern Art opened in November 1929 with its first exhibition, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh. Since that time the Museum has presented more than 3,500 exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, architecture and design, photography, film, performance, and new media. The exhibition history can be searched freely, or browsed in a more structured way by exhibition type or time period. Each…

Online Resources | Nationalmuseum in Sweden releases 3000 images on Wikimedia Commons

Always great to see another museum making high-quality images of their collection available online and into the public domain so they can be used freely for any purpose. The director Berndt Arell says ‘We also want to make the point that these artworks belong to and are there for all of us, regardless of how the images are used. We hope our open collection will inspire creative new uses and interpretations of the artworks’. Great stuff! From Sweden’s Nationalmuseum Nationalmuseum is making 3,000 high-resolution images of its most popular artworks available for free download on Wikimedia Commons. Zoomable images will also be added to the museum’s online database. The digitization project is a major advance in making Nationalmuseum’s collections more accessible. While the Nationalmuseum building is under renovation, only a small part of the collections is accessible to the public.…

Online Resource | Stuarts Online

An online resource dedicated to the history of Stuart Britain funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council, and developed by the universities of Exeter and Oxford in partnership with the Ash­molean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Historical Association, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Some of it seems aimed at teachers with lesson plans and similar, but there are also useful list of online resources, transcribed historical texts, timelines and short biographies of the major players. From the website: Stuarts Online is a rich resource, bringing cutting-edge scholarship on the Stuart era to a wider audience. By focusing on key moments, documents and artefacts, Stuarts Online brings this pivotal period of British political and cultural history to life, for teachers, students and the wider public. The website contains twenty films – each centred on a key text or artefact – which…

Podcast | PHOTOGRAPHY.ONTOLOGY

The Photography.Ontology Symposium held earlier this year in Sydney has made the keynote talks available as podcasts. Download or listen via this link http://www.photographiccultures.com/podcasts/ Professor Shawn Michelle Smith Looking Forward and Looking Back: Rashid Johnson and Frederick Douglass on Photography This talk was a key note address for the 2016 Photography.Ontology symposium that took place at the University of Sydney on 2 June 2016. Professor Smith considers Frederick Douglass’s propositions about the social power of photography. Looking back at Douglass’s lecture “Pictures and Progress” through the lens of contemporary artist Rashid Johnson’s homage to the nineteenth-century orator, the talk examines Douglass’s surprising celebration of photography as an objectifying medium. Douglass saw the persistence of photographs as both a conserving and a conservative force, and Johnson’s self-portrait after Douglass testifies to that doubled dynamic. But Douglass also found progressive power in the…

Call for field editors for CAA Reviews

CAA reviews logo

caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a term ending June 30, 2019. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to reviewing books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts. The journal seeks field editors for books in the following subject areas: early modern Iberian and Latin American art; design history; American art; architecture and urbanism, pre-1800; eighteenth-century art; and Japanese art. The journal also seeks field editors for exhibitions in the following areas: modern and contemporary art; New York and international; and west coast pre-1900. Candidates may be artists, art or design historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required. Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the editorial board,…

Threats to funding of the National Library of Australia’s ‘Trove’

Disturbing news came out last week that proposed cuts to the budget of the National Library of Australia may threaten the future of Trove. While there are no threats to service as a whole, one effect of the cuts may be tat Trove will stop “aggregating content in Trove from museums and universities unless it is fully funded to do so.” There is also the possibility that digitisation of collections will slow down. These cuts follow years of funding cuts to our cultural institutions by both sides of government. This is seriously bad news for humanities researchers (among others), who rely on Trove as an easily accessible and very user-friendly ‘collection of collections’. Trove is free and available to anyone, anywhere in the world, making it an important tool that drives research both inside and outside of academia. Moreover, Trove is recognised…

New website Art UK

The very successful Your Paintings website begun by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation back in 2011 has been succeeded by a new website called ArtUK, now run by the Public Catalogue Foundation with support from the BBC. It is great to see such a useful website growing and expanding. Digital spaces that aggregate information from a  variety of collections are really important, gallery and museum databases are invaluable, but often as a researcher you aren’t sure what is held where, and your chances of knowing that there is, say, a small portrait by your artist held in a regional town hall might be pretty well zero. These aggregate websites are also especially important for image researchers as web search tools like Google still often fall short, a google search on a specific artist is often flooded with the same well-known image…

CAA launches new caa.reviews site

CAA reviews logo

CAA has revamped their excellent online reviews site. All reviews are now open access (not sure if this is new, but I recall some were only open to members when the site first launched). Reviews are now also published under a creative cmmons license, which means that the content can be shared. Link to the revamped caa.reviews website. From CAA: CAA and Routledge are pleased to announce the launch of a new website for caa.reviews, an online, open-access journal of book and exhibition reviews in the visual arts. The new site has a cleaner look, is easier to navigate, and has faster and smarter search tools. New filters based on geography, time period, and genre or specialization allow readers to narrow and focus search results, making it easier to find specific articles. An important addition for caa.reviews is a Creative…

Online Resource | Back Issues of Ars Orientalis now available online

Thanks to a digitization effort made possible with help from Smithsonian Libraries and the Internet Archive, Ars Orientalis volumes 1 to 41 are now available to read online, free of charge. See the website here to browse the archive. About Ars Orientalis Ars Orientalis is a joint publication of the Freer Gallery of Art and University of Michigan’s History of Art Department. The journal is published annually and inldes peer-reviewed articles, as well as reviews of books on teh art and archaeology of Asia, the ancient Near-East, and the Islamic world. The journal is a collection of scholarship that crosses academic disciplines and aims to connect researchers, institutions, and ideas using one central theme per volume. The journal originated from the ideals of two visionary men: Charles Lang Freer, the Detroit industrialist who donated the art collection that formed the Freer Gallery…