After Work, Guinness
Iconic British Poster Design Launched Online
From the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign to advertisements for Gillette and Guinness, the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is pleased to announce that a further 100 images from the archives of designer Tom Eckersley have now been made publically available online.
The collection was formed by Eckersley and is held at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre. The collection is available online at:
http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/TEC
National Portrait Gallery / Wikipedia argument
There has been quite a lot of information flying around since a Wikipedia user downloaded and then stitched together high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery, before putting them up as a single files on Wikipedia.
The statement from the National Portrait Gallery clears up a lot of confusion and seems quite even handed.
The National Portrait Gallery is very strongly committed to giving access to its Collection. In the past five years the Gallery has spent around £1 million digitising its Collection to make it widely available for study and enjoyment. We have so far made available on our website more than 60,000 digital images, which have attracted millions of users, and we believe this extensive programme is of great public benefit.
The Gallery supports Wikipedia in its aim of making knowledge widely available and we would be happy for the site to use our low-resolution images, sufficient for most forms of public access, subject to safeguards. However, in March 2009 over 3000 high-resolution files were appropriated from the National Portrait Gallery website and published on Wikipedia without permission.
The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery’s primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view.
Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the Gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database.
To date, Wikipedia has not responded to our requests to discuss the issue and so the National Portrait Gallery has been obliged to issue a lawyer’s letter. The Gallery remains willing to enter into a dialogue with Wikipedia
“Ideal Women” online
“Many, if not all, of the Pre-Raphaelites had their own ideal of beauty“,
as the recently launched Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource illustrates through beautiful images of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and sketches in its Learning resources section.
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource gives free access to over 3000 images related to the works of artists belonging to one of the most important British art movement, including founding members William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais as well as material from the broader context.
Key features of this beautiful and easy to navigate web site are:
• full record information for each image
• zoom-in function, to allow users to examine images in great detail
• browse and advanced search
• background resources on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and artists
• exemplars of learning resources, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, as well as the facility for teachers to create their own
• personal collection, a functionality which allow users to group and theme images from the collection as well as take part in online discussions
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and created by the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
‘Staying Stylish in Hard Times’: Wartime cosmetics archives launched online
In these times of economic hardship and ever decreasing household budgets, it is always good to remind ourselves of times when money was extremely short.
The Visual Arts Data service (VADS) has just launched an online wartime cosmetics archive.
The archives of Gala, Miner’s and Crystal, three prominent cosmetics companies operating during and after the Second World War, are held at London College of Fashion and have been digitised and made freely accessible through the VADS website.
The archives are a valuable resource for the study of the history of cosmetics, advertising photography, fashion promotion and women in the Second World War.
One of the company’s in the archive, Gala of London, was also the first company to introduce lip stick in a tube when they introduced their lipline in 1957.
During the War when silk was needed for parachutes and stockings disappeared from the shops, Miner’s had particular success with its leg make-up, Miners Liquid Stockings,allowing women to draw black lines down theback of their legs to simulate the seams.
The three cosmetics archives have been digitised by the London College of Fashion and made available online through the ‘Enhancing VADS’ project, funded as part of the Enriching Digital Resources programme from JISC.
The collection is available through the VADS website.
Getting Your Resource Noted: Penguins, Icebergs and Heroes
The recently launched Freeze Frame project, which has digitised over 20,000 images of historic polar expeditions, has achieved phenomenal interest in the press.
The press page on the JISC website lists 32 news articles or features, including an audio slideshow on the BBC website, and articles in newspapers as diverse as the Scotsman, the Daily Mirror and the magazine Computer Active.
Offering the press eye-catching images such as the one featured here certainly help but a number of other issues also aided the project gain such recognition
- Having particular stories to about the images to tie into the images (in this case Scott’s journey to the Antarctic)
- Identifying a press day for the media to visit to take photographs, undertake interviews and get quotes
- Having a clear URL for the website accessible to all
- Support from a PR agency to contact media outlets to offer the story (JISC has offered this service to all its large-scale digitisation projects)
New online resources launched: polar images and theatre in the East End
Two new online collections, funded by the JISC Digitisation programme, launched yesterday giving global access to thousand of images ranging from polar expeditions to theatre and entertainment in the East End of London.
Freeze Frame: Historic Polar Images features an archive of 20,000 images depicting the history of polar exploration, inlcuding the adventures of famous explorers such as Captain Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and, more recently, Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
The project was carried out by the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, in collaboration with DSpace@Cambridge.
The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Freeze Frame is the result of a two-year digitisation project that brings together photographs from both Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Here you can discover the polar regions through the eyes of those explorers and scientists who dared to go into the last great wildernesses on earth.
The project has had extensive media coverage, all of which can be found on the JISC’s Communications page and a slide show on the BBC website.
The East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) website brings together selections of material from a variety of theatre collections, including the V&A Theatre Collections, Hackney empire, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Hoxton Hall, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Venture and Wilton’s Music Hall.
The collections can be searched or browsed and a number of thematic essays contextualise the material, exploring issues such as East London immigration, black characters in theatre, crime and punshment and nautical drama, among others.
ELTA represents an innovative step towards unlocking the theatrical past of East London for academics and historians on a national and international basis. While the theatre of the West End has been subject to a notable amount of research, less attention to date has been paid to the East End, despite its significant contribution to performing arts in the 19th to 21st centuries. This resource will help to address this and enrich researchers’ knowledge of East London’s pivotal role in theatre.
Commercial Images Means Better Websites
A previous article on another digi blog illustrated how the commercial arms of the British Library and British Museum seemed to produce more efficient and innovative websites for users to browse and buy their digital wares.
Following on from this, Christie’s the Auctioneers have an excellent website which allowed potential customers and interested bystanders to browse the collections they sell, such as the the recently sold Yves St Laurent collection of art. You can visit the various lots via the Christie’s calendar of events.
As well as being well designed, there are plenty of easy-to-use functions to allow buyers to navigate through the images, including a slide rule which allows them to determine the price, and a plenty of meaningful categories (eg. painting, jewellery, furniture) which make it simple to navigate through the many thousands of images in each collection.
Again, certain public sector sites, for whatever kind of digital content, could take a leaf out of commercial sector’s book.
Art on Google Earth – Good but not good enough
There has been plenty of publicity about the eye-wateringly beautiful digital images produced by Madrid’s Prado museum in association with Google Earth.
Detail from Rubens’ The Three Graces, Prado Museum, Madrid. Taken from Google Earth.
Contrary to what some art critics have written, this is, in some ways, a more powerful experience than seeing the original, where glass, ropes and bollards block such an intense close-up experience.
However, like Google’s project to recreate classical Rome, such resources are great for the general public they are not quite good enough for a university audience.
A researcher or lecturer certainly wants high-quality images, but they also want
- the ability to easily download and manipulate the image
- related tools that can comapre and contrast images
- a stable URL to cite the digital address of the image
- good quality information about the painting (i.e. catalogue / metadata stuff)
- to be able to search all paintings in the Prado (in fact the whole world) – not just the highlights!
- clear copyright terms and conditions about using.
Do that for us Google and we will be very happy.
The launch of JISC Digital Media
JISC Digital Media is the new name for the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI). The JISC Digital Media team will continue to provide advice, training and guidance on the creation and use of digital media collections, with the expanded service now providing expertise in moving images and sound in addition to still images and their use in learning, teaching and research.
From help with finding and using the right media, to advice on creating and delivering digital formats or consultancy on managing a digitisation project, JISC Digital Media promotes good practice, technical expertise, the use of appropriate standards and the sharing of knowledge within the UK FE and HE communities.
JISC Digital Media are also holding a number of reception events where you can find out more about the service. Visit the team blog to get further details, or email launch@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk .
For further information about JISC Digital Media’s services please visit the website, email: info@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk or call 0117 331 4447
The Library of Congress and Flickr
A year ago the Library of Congress asked members of the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 3000 historic photos using Flickr, the photosharing website. The LOC reports that within the first 24 hours of the project starting Flickr recorded 1.1 million total views on the account, with 3.6 million views a week later, and have had 10.4 million views on Flickr up to October 2008. Very impressive figures indeed!
The project was able to stimulate interest not only in the images themselves, and it would appear from the report that the academic and public community were surprised by the depth of cultural and historic resources available at the library. But the project was also able to prompt interest in web 2.0 technologies and foster an interest in the library and its diverse resources and collections.
The LOC reported that the project pilot had the following outcomes:
- 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
- 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
- More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
- 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
- 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
- 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
- Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
- More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
More information about the project and the full report can be found at the LOC’s Prints and Photographs reading room. There was also a very interesting article in the New York Times exploring tagging and descriptive metadata in Flickr and Wikipedia.