Tag: Digitisation

Online Resource | Jewish Museum of Australia launches digitised collection

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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…

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Online Resource | Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery Digitised Collection

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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…

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Wednesday News Round Up | 29th June 2016 | Arts Funding, Brexit, SCA and UNSW merger + more

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News The Daily Review has come out with an editorial saying that ‘A Vote for the Coalition is a Vote against the Arts’ and with Arts Minister Mitch Fifield yet to release an arts policy and only the coalition’s past performance on arts funding (de-funding more like it) it’s a pretty straightforward claim. I am aiming to a pre-election round-up on Friday of all the latest arts funding news and debates and links to the policies of the main parties (where they exist…). The protests over cuts have been making international news with stories in Hyperallergic and Apollo Magazine. The other major news is the recently announced merger of the Sydney College of Art with UNSW. The VCA’s Su Baker has a great opinion piece in The Australian where she makes the point that the SCA has been punching well above its weight and…

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

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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…

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New website Art UK

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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…

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Recent News and Writing on Art History | 22nd January 2016

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A round-up of recent stories from the world of art, museums and art history. A story from Tim Walsh in Apollo that asks whether Australia’s ‘coup culture’ in politics is hurting the arts. “In the space of five years, Australia has seen five prime ministers attempt to take the reins of an increasingly erratic and jittery federal parliament. In tandem, Australia’s art world keenly felt each twist and turn; moments of optimism were eclipsed by fear and doubt with the election of the right wing conservative government led by Tony Abbott in September 2013.” A report on Enfilade that the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library has catalogued, re-catalogued, and made available online 60,000 objects in their collection. While the Yale Center for British Art has just released more than 22,000 additional high-resolution images through its online collection (available here). To date, the Center has made…

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News | Telstra and the National Gallery of Victoria announce three year creative partnership

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The NGV has announced a three-year creative partnership with Telstra, which promises ‘creativity and innovation in a digital world’. It would be nice to have some more solid detail about exactly what the partnership hopes to achieve, beyond the statements in the press release, which include things like ‘reaching out’, ‘unlocking potential’, and ‘to revolutionise the gallery experience’ (does it need to be revolutionised?) But, there is certainly much the NGV could do digitally so here is what I hope it means. 1. Digitisation and online access to the entire collection Ideally the entire NGV collection (or a substantial amount of it) would be made available online with high quality images and relevant information about each work. The NGV already has a large number of works available via their website but the search is very basic (keyword only and no way to…

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News | Metropolitan Museum of Art makes 400k images available for free download

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced last week that “more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum’s world-renowned collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee. The number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.” Press release here. The Met joins a growing number of art museums, such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, that are making it easier and more affordable to study, teach and publish on art history. There are further details here.

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Lecture | Analyzing and transmitting medieval manuscripts in the digital age - Professor Bernard Muir, FAHA

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Analyzing and transmitting medieval manuscripts in the digital age Professor Bernard Muir, FAHA In this lecture Professor Muir will demonstrate a variety of challenges encountered when working with documents surviving from the Middle Ages, and the latest developments in the digital presentation such texts with specific reference to his published facsimiles; he will also suggest ways in which our understanding of the nature and function of the book is being transformed by its presentation in digital format. Date: Wednesday 20 November 6.00pm – 7.00pm Venue: Sunderland Lecture Theatre, level 2 (ground floor), Medical Building, corner of Grattan Street and Royal Parade, The University of Melbourne Admission is free Bookings are required RSVP: http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/ bernard_muir For further information call 8344 9800 . Bernard Muir taught medieval studies at the University of Melbourne for thirty years before taking early retirement in 2010 so that he could dedicate…

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Recent writing about Art and Art History – January 27

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Recent writing about Art and Art History The other Vitruvian man - Smithsonian magazine article on a recently discovered 15th century version of Vitruvius’s Universal Man JISC digitisation - the problem of studying art history and images on the web and why words are the answer. Academics warn of damage to Aboriginal rock art, including vandalism. The Age and other media outlets (The Telegraph, ABC) report on a painting stolen from the NGV 12 years ago and suggest the gallery only just reported it. However, the NGV has since released a statement explaining that the painting has now been officially reported as stolen rather than just missing in order to claim insurance - Bonington Media Release. Review of the Nicholas Chevalier exhibition on at Geelong Gallery until February 12th. JSTOR announces limited free access to read articles to individuals without a subscription…

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News: Digitised Manuscripts Website Launched by British Library

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Digitised Manuscripts Website Launched by British Library The British Library has launched a Digitised Manuscripts site. It features full coverage of 284 Greek manuscripts drawn from the library’s Additional and Harley manuscript collections. The manuscripts, dating from the sixth to the 18th centuries, encompass a wide range of literary, historical, biblical, liturgical and scientific texts. Some of the manuscripts are beautifully illuminated, including an artistic highlight of the collection, the Theodore Psalter (Add. MS 19352). Apparently this is part of an 18 month project, the site will continued to be enhanced and new content will be added over this period. It is a pilot for wider plans by the library to digitise all the medieval and early manuscript collections. Further details can be found here. In recent years the British Library has begun putting its collection online. Other digitsiation projects…

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