New applications for social media in museums

More and more museums are now using social media and other new technology both to engage their existing audience in new ways and to bring in a new audience.   Forward-thinking museums are creating iPhone apps and Facebook pages with interactive elements, and posting myriad content on their websites.

There are also interesting new partnerships among museums.  One such collaboration is ArtBabble, a site with video content from 60 partner museums (including short curator talks, conversations with artists,  full  lectures, performance pieces, and more).

Some institutions, like the Guggenheim, are inviting video input which they post on their site YouTube Play.  A recent call for content received 23,000 submissions!

If you want to read more, there’s a good profile in the New York Times of  people directing innovative social media initiatives at the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

How to read a Chinese handscroll painting

The newly-appointed Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maxwell Hearn, discusses the intimate relationship between object and viewer with a 14th century Chinese handscroll painting in this video from the New York Times. For other videos from the museum, see their YouTube Channel.

New ARTstor images available

The ARTstor Digital Library has just announced these images are now available:

• ART on FILE: 1,100 images of contemporary architecture in the United Arab Emirates, which brings the final total to 11,743 views of contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and public art from around the world
• Islamic Art and Architecture Collection: 250 images of Iznik ceramics, rounding out the total to 19,009 images from the personal archives of scholars Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (Boston College) and Walter B. Denny (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Additionally, a new agreement has been reached with Baltimore Museum of Art and its archives to share roughly 2,000 images of works from the permanent collection, including the historical Cone Collection, and 100 photographs of exhibition installations

Experiencing the earthquake in Toyo Ito’s Mediatheque in Sendai

Culture Monster has posted a video someone took during Friday’s earthquake while braving it out under a desk in Mediatheque cultural center in Sendai. As Christopher Hawthorne points out, both the length of the quake and the sway of the building are amazing to watch, especially since the structure seems to survive roughly intact.

Leo Steinberg, 1920-2011

Art historian Leo Steinberg died on Sunday.   A scholar and art critic specializing in artists of the Italian Renaissance, he also wrote extensively on 20th century art.  Read the full New York Times obituary here.

Rare Book Room showcases great books of the world

The website Rare Book Room offers a wide variety of books digitized by a company called Octavo (it is unclear whether they are still in business). Octavo digitally photographed a selection of books–about 400–from some of the world’s greatest libraries at medium/high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page). Users can browse by category, author, and library or perform simple searches.