New ARTstor collection releases

ARTstor announced the following collections are now available:

• The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (approximately 800 images, learn more)
• The Roy Lichtenstein Collection (800 images, learn more)
• MoMA Exhibition Installation Photograph Collection [The Museum of Modern Art Archives] (last release completed and totals roughly 16,700 images, learn more)
• Larry Qualls Archive of Contemporary Art (digitized in multiple releases; more than 56,400 of the projected 100,000 total are currently available, learn more)

New ARTstor feature: Associated Image Clusters

There are two new icons in ARTstor that help you efficiently find and use images. When applicable, the icons are located beneath a thumbnail image on the search results screen and help you act on special features related to that image. The two new icons are:

• Duplicates & Details:  This identifies groups of image duplicates and details centered around one “lead” image chosen for its high quality (which is why you will find the icon under only one image in the group)
• Associated Images:  Also called “You may also be interested in…”, this icon “recommends” images based on those most frequently used (i.e., downloaded, saved in image groups) with this image by other ARTstor users. This feature is especially great for survey courses!

To use these features, just click on the icon.   (summarized from ARTstor’s website: http://www.artstor.org/news/n-html/an-090205-tip.shtml)

Searching with diacritics on VRC-MDID:

While searching on the VRC’s image database is very flexible and user-friendly, there is one flaw which came up again this week. If a word is entered in our catalogue with diacritics or accents (e.g. the umlaut in DÜRER) you will need to include those in your search – in other words, DÜRER will work, DURER won’t. MDID Version 3 is coming soon, and the programmers are hoping to have that fixed so that DURER and DÜRER will both work.

Image resources available to all UCSB users

We keep a growing list of resources here – there are links to our collection database (VRC-MDID), ARTstor, plus many other image resources, organized and annotated. Some of these are open to the public, some are licensed for UCSB use. Please visit, and let us know if you find something great to add, or notice any errors.

Get oriented at The Red Dot

Welcome to the new blog of the Visual Resources Collection at UCSB, The Red Dot.  In case you don’t get that reference, it’s the little red dot in the corner of our 35mm slides that help you with orientation.  And that’s what we’re here for – orientation, information, hot tips, and more.  We’ll be posting regularly on new additions to the online collection, user tips, and links to great new image sites.  Please check in regularly! (Thanks to Christine Fritsch-Hammes for our new name!)