Pathfinder: New Virtual Tour of the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago has just launched an interactive floor plan called Pathfinder. This tool allows one to explore the entire floor plan, with links to works of art and their catalog information, panorama views of galleries, and exhibitions and events. Events include daily programming such as gallery talks and tours. Available in both English and Spanish, this is an innovative way to present the museum to those who may not be able to visit in person, as well as those who may be planning visits. The Art Institute plans to include gallery views of its entire collection as the museum's renovations proceed in the coming months.

Can You (or Your Students) Afford Not to Know About Free Photoshop Alternatives?

Yet another profile and assessment of Photoshop alternatives has appeared: Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers, by Jolie O'Dell on ReadWriteWeb. O'Dell reviews 1) Photofiltre, 2) Paint.NET, 3) The GIMP, 4) Aviary, 5) Splashup, 6) flauntR, and 7) FotoFlexer. And here yet another reviewer finds GIMP to be a superior choice. "All things being equal, there's not a lot we can say to criticize GIMP. As an open source app, it is subject to continuous rounds of improvement; there is no free app that will duplicate the Photoshop experience as well as GIMP will."

Even if you already own Photoshop, you may want to keep these resources in mind for your students, who will surely appreciate knowing about free and open source alternatives. A couple of recent and related entries on this blog are worth mentioning, too. One post is about a SitePoint article on 19 Impressive Online Image Editors (many of which are free), and the other post is about GimpShop, a free modification of the GIMP that's intended to replicate the feel of Photoshop.

Via Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian.

Image: from Jolie O'Dell, Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers

Finding Images on Flickr: Advice Document from JISC

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has just released an advice document, Finding Images on Flickr. With hints on using images you find on Flickr, sorting your search results, date searching, finding images using maps, finding photos taken by specific camera models, subscribing to photo feeds, and more, this document contains a lot of useful information. A section on further resources provides related links such as JISC's Photo Sharing Sites and Images in Blogs and Wikis, Flickr's How to get the most out of Flickr, and Creative Commons' Questions for people thinking about using a Creative Commons-licensed work.

Image: johnb/uk, old/cameras, 2009. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

VRC Flickr Page: New Building and DMB Collective Images

The VRC has posted images on Flickr of our latest tour of the new Visual Arts Complex building (June 30) and of the July 3rd DMB Collective show opening at Vertigo in Denver. Please visit the VRC's Flickr group page to see these snapshots.

To view the latest VAC images as a set, enter "June tour" in the "search this group's pool" field at the upper right. When you get the search results you can scroll through them in "slideshow" mode by clicking on the Slideshow link on the right side of the page. To view the DMB opening images as a set, enter "DMB" in "search this group's pool."

If you are a faculty or staff member, student, or alumnus/a of the Department of Art and Art History, please consider joining the "Visual Resources, Art and Art History, CU-Boulder" group. You need to register for a free Flickr account in order to join the group and contribute content.

ARTstor Celebrates One Million Images

ARTstor celebrates its fifth anniversary and one millionth image this month. ARTstor has come a long way since its launch of 300,000 images in July of 2004. ARTstor's latest newsletter outlines some of the important developments that have occurred in ARTstor, as well as the exciting plans in store.

Subscribers can now download images at screen size for use in PowerPoint. ARTstor now offers over 350,000 images of modern and contemporary art. Scholars can take advantage of the Images for Academic Publishing services at no charge. One of the most promising developments in the works is Shared Shelf, an enterprise cataloging and image management system that works in conjunction with ARTstor, which institutions will use to provide more seamless access to visual resources.

In just a few years ARTstor has become an integral resource for many disciplines at the University of Colorado. Congratulations to ARTstor on an incredible five years, and many thanks to ARTstor for listening and responding so effectively to the user community.

Howard Rheingold: Crap Detection 101

Here's a little more on information literacy. Howard Rheingold's recent article, Crap Detection 101, is full of great tips for wading through online "toxic badinfo" and identifying credible information online.

These tips include easywhois.com for finding out who owns a Web site, factchecked.org for verifying online facts, Newstrust for news literacy tools, and many others.

As one commenter noted, Rheingold's article failed to mention that librarians are excellent at detecting and filtering out bad information. Remember that the Research and Instruction librarians at the University Libraries are experts at helping faculty and students with research questions. In addition to walk-in inquiries at the research desk, their "Ask Us" service offers consultations by e-mail, phone, or chat.

Image: Justin Hall, Howard Rheingold, from Howard Rheingold's Web site.

ArtBabble: Online Videos About Art

If you are looking for online video content about art, be sure to check out ArtBabble. Launched earlier this spring by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, ArtBabble is "intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives."

Now partnering with IMA is Art21, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the New York Public Library. IMA intends to continue adding content from these and other institutions, hoping that it will become an online destination for videos about art.

Videos on the Web site may be found by keyword searching or by browsing different categories. The "Series" tab includes Shaping the New Century: An International Design Symposium, Behind the Scenes at MoMA, Art21--Exclusive, NYPL: Design by the Book, Roman Art from the Louvre Webisodes, and more. The "Channels" tab contains alphabetically arranged keywords for finding content on the site, each of which is accompanied by the number of relevant videos in parentheses. Examples include Ancient Art (17), Ceramics (4), Contemporary Art (93), Exhibitions (51), Film (5), Painting (10), Talks (23), and Video Art (4). The "Artists" tab contains a list of over 150 artists currently represented by videos on the site. This includes contemporary artists, such as Lita Albuquerque, Dawoud Bey, Chuck Close, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Kerry James Marshall, Pipilotti Rist, Jessica Stockholder, and Richard Tuttle. It also includes some historical figures, such as Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, and Piet Mondrian. The "Partners" tab enables browsing by the project partners listed above.

Twitter Search in Plain English from Common Craft

Common Craft has recently released a new video: Twitter Search in Plain English. As with their other videos, Common Craft uses charming paper prototyping and plain talk to provide an overview of the topic in a short and concise way. It's a follow-up to their Twitter in Plain English introduction.

I have mentioned Common Craft before -- they have created a range of these videos on technology topics such as social bookmarking, RSS feeds, wikis, and podcasting. See their Web site for more examples.