CURRENT VRC NEWS (Click here for the VRC NEWS ARCHIVE page)

2007-2008

VRC Digital Image Collection
The Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection is pleased to announce the launch of the new teaching and research digital image collection of the Department of Art & Art History. It comprises increasing numbers of images depicting historical and contemporary art, architecture, and other visual and material culture from around the world. See the VRC Digital Image Collection page from more information.

The VRC is a founding member of the Digital Image Collaborative, a consortium among academic departments and colleges at the University of Colorado and the institutions of the Auraria Higher Education Center, which provides access to images for education and research to all current faculty, students, and staff at these institutions. These collections in turn are part of the University of Colorado Digital Library (CU-DL), a CU system-wide collaboration with the Auraria Higher Education Center, which includes digital collections from many departments, colleges, libraries, as well as other institutions from around the world. IMPORTANT: Faculty members from the CU-Boulder campus who wish to export and use images from the CU-DL will want to use a Java client rather than the browser version currently available on the CU-DL web site. See our VRC DIGITAL IMAGE COLLECTION page for more information.

For information on the process by which the software Luna Insight was chosen as the common digital library platform at the University of Colorado, see the VRC News Archive page.

We've Moved to Our Temporary Facilities
The Department of Art and Art History has moved to two temporary buildings while the old Sibell Wolle building is razed and the new Visual Arts Complex is built in its footprint. The VRC is now located in room 82 in the Fleming Building, near the corner of Broadway and Baseline. We continue to offer the same services provided in the old building.

Digital Imaging and Technology Coordinator
The Visual Resources Collection warmly welcomes Lia Pileggi, our (semi) new Digital Imaging and Technology Coordinator. Her position has been recently upgraded to 3/4 time, making an immense difference in the servives that the VRC can provide. Lia offers training in scanning and digital portfolio preparation for students and faculty alike, and provides in-house technical support in classrooms.

ARTstor News
ARTstor, the digital library of images, associated information, and software tools designed to complement teaching, learning and scholarship. ARTstor's ever-growing archive currently contains approximately 700,000 images of art, architecture, archaeology and other visual and material culture from around the world. ARTstor has recently made approximately 95% of its holdings available for dowloading at a size of 1024 pixels on the long side. Those wishing to use larger ARTstor images to zoom and create details in offline presentations should still use ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer (OIV) software. It is an excellent and easy to use image presentation program that allows one to combine personal images with ARTstor's images.

ARTstor has also recently implemented its Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) project. It "seeks to facilitate scholarship in the arts by reducing the costs associated with publishing images in academic journals and similar publications. Image providers participating in IAP have supplied publication-quality images and agreed to make them available free-of-charge for use in scholarly publications. As a service to the community, ARTstor has developed the software to deliver these publication-quality images to users." For more information, visit the IAP web site.

To access the ARTstor digital library, please go to www.artstor.org. From that page, click on the orange "Go" button in the upper right to enter the Welcome Page of the ARTstor Digital Library. Anyone accessing ARTstor from an on-campus computer will be granted access automatically by IP authentication. To access ARTstor from an off-campus computer, you must first access ARTstor from a computer on campus and register. This will initiate a 120-day Remote Access Grace Period, during which you will be able to log on remotely using your e-mail address and the password you created. Each time you log on to ARTstor from a computer on campus, the 120-day grace period will be reinitiated. You may also access ARTstor remotely without re-authenticating from a campus IP address by using Virtual Private Network (VPN) software. VPN software allows you to access resources that are limited to users at the University of Colorado (e.g., ARTstor), by making your computer appear to be accessing the Internet via the Boulder network, rather than through an off campus ISP.  See www.colorado.edu/its/vpn for information on downloading and installing the VPN software.

Click here to view the Boulder Campus ARTstor Quick Start Guide [PDF], which contains technical requirements and contact information for getting help with ARTstor.

Click here to view the libraries' ARTstor web page.