Available now on Plato’s Cave, the Medieval collection in the VRC has now been re-scanned and all of the images are ready to view in formats for browsing or for downloading in JPEG form. From Early Christian to Byzantine to Romanesque to Gothic, we’ve got manuscript illuminations, reliquaries, tapestries and more!
To find these images, go to the Advanced Search on Plato’s Cave. Using the pull down menus, go to Field, and select Collection. Under Qualifier select Equal To and type “Med” in the Criteria box. Then click on Continue. You should be rewarded with 1,213 images, complete with JPEGs for PowerPoint. For example:
The Medieval collection isn’t the only project we’ve been working on. Our busy work-study student employees have been scanning the Architecture collection and we added nearly 3,900 new images to Plato’s Cave during Fall 2009, for a total of 172,873 scanned images. Of those, 109,000 also have JPEGs available for downloading. We are making progress!
New! We’ve added a link on the left under VRC Info for Galleries. Right now there is a gallery of P. H. Elwood Lantern Slides and a (growing) gallery of contemporary Iowa architecture images from the AIA Iowa Awards program. The galleries are viewable with a free web browser plugin called Cooliris (formerly PicLens). Click on the AIA Iowa gallery and you will see this:
You can view the images on the Cooliris “Wall” on the VRC homepage, clicking on images to get a larger view, scrolling through the gallery, and searching for images with keywords.
Or, you can click on the Launch Cooliris button on the tool bar, far right, and see the same gallery on the big screen:
The New York Times online today has a feature and slide show on the art on loan to the Obama White House. The eclectic selection of art on loan from the National Gallery of Art includes works by George Catlin, Richard Diebenkorn, and Alma Thomas (below).
You can read all about the art and the selection process here and view the slide show here.
The largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found in the UK was discovered by a citizen who was metal detecting last July.
The Staffordshire hoard contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.
Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum’s Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: “This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.
“(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.”
A gallery of these stunning newly found metal pieces can be found on Flickr and a BBC News account (with videos) can be seen here.
Here’s a YouTube review of the controversial Jeff Koons show at the Palace of Versailles.
This show opened in 2008, so this blog post is bit after the fact… Neverthleless, this is a fun diversion for a Friday. The New York Times published a slide show of the exhibit last year, and you may find that here.
The complete set of Mesa Verde National Park lantern slides is now scanned, edited and available for viewing on Flickr. This will be just one park we will do from the many that are residing in the VRC lantern slide collection. The next park, which is in process and some of which are already on Flickr, will be Mount Rainier National Park.
In addition, all of these lantern slides are cataloged and available on Plato’s Cave for research and download for presentations.
Our coolness factor increased by several notches when this inflated structure appeared in the COD atrium last week. It remained a mystery for a couple of days until I did some snooping and found out that it is actually a demonstration area for a rendering plugin that allows for 360 degree 3D display (with glasses). It appears that it will remain up for a few more days.
