Free Sites for Sharing Very Large Files

Have you ever been stumped on how to share a very large file, such as a video?  Over at CNET, Josh Lowensohn has posted a very useful entry on paid and free services that allow you to share very large files with colleagues, friends, and family.

Lowensohn provides a list divided into free and paid services, along with a brief overview of the features that each one offers.  The "Which one to use?" section helps you assess whether a free service will meet your needs.

Image: nouQraz, Laptop Orchestra @ Wired Nextfest 2006, 2006.  From Flickr, some rights reserved under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license

Clever Music Video Inspired by Art History

Art history fans should take a few minutes to watch this music video for the song "70 Million," by the band Hold Your Horses!  It's a creative and fun tribute to the canon of Western art.  I love the low budg sets, which are actually quite effective (good lighting always helps).  While it's hard to pick, I think my favorite is the nod to Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters.

14 Tools to Teach about Creative Commons

Creative Commons licenses facilitate access to all kinds of media works for use in creative and scholarly pursuits, but they also provide individuals who create works (whether text, image, sound, or video-based) more flexibility in how they wish to share these works with others.  With the growing prevalence of digital media, copyright ethics is an increasingly important matter for creators, users, and educators to understand and appreciate.  Over at the The Clever Sheep, Rodd Lucier has shared 14 Tools to Teach about Creative Commons.   The sections are Creative Commons Toolkits, Great Places to Host and License Your Creative Work, Video Explanations of The Creative Commons, Creative Commons Audio Sources, My Favourite Open Source Projects, Slideshow Explanations for Education, Creative Commons Social Networks, and Late Additions.

Under late additions, the presentation Creative Commons: What every Educator needs to know is particularly useful to anyone involved in instruction, asking questions such as "How do we model academic integrity?" and "How can we teach 'creative integrity'?"

Via the always informative Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian.

Image: Temari 09, Learning time, 2009. From Flickr, some rights reserved under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license.

WorldImages: 75,000 Images from California State University

Scholars and students who study visual culture should be aware of WorldImages, a free and growing resource offering images for use in teaching, scholarship, and research.  WorldImages is a remarkable project initiated and directed by Dr. Kathleen Cohen of California State University.  Over the years she has photographed works related to her teaching, first in the form of slides and more recently in digital format.  As the collection has grown to nearly 75,000 images, so have its contributors.  This is an impressive and inspiring model of collaboration, and a generous example of academic sharing.  As its title suggests, the image collection covers a very broad range of cultures and historical periods.  Check it out!

There are a number of ways to search the collection.  You can browse the collections by themed groups called portfolios, including community portfolios, which comprise interesting and useful sets compiled by community members.  You can also search by keyword, advanced, quick, date, and creator biography searches.  More information is available at the Help and Tutorials pages.

How can these images be used? "Faculty from many disciplines are using the images for research assignments, to create course study pages, to include in their lectures and to create on-line materials. Students are using the image database for study and research, for term papers, and to create collaborative multimedia presentations."

Image: Anonymous, Roman Republican/Early Imperial. Mosaic, Theater masks. Rome, Italy. ©Kathleen Cohen. Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

U.S. National Archives in The Commons at Flickr

The U.S. National Archives has joined The Commons at Flickr.  Their high resolution offerings feature photographs by Ansel Adams, Mathew Brady, lots of images from the EPA's DOCUMERICA project (1971-1977), and many more historical photographs and documents.  You can view their collections here.  As with all images in The Commons, these images carry no known copyright restrictions.

Image: Erik Calonius, Interior of Graffiti-Marked Subway Car, 05/1973. From the DOCUMERICA project. U.S. National Archives.  From Flickr, no known copyright restrictions.

Smithsonian National Museum of American History Online

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History houses more than three million objects, and the museum is gradually building its online collection to share these treasures with you electronically.  You can browse the collections by such subjects as advertising, art, family and social life, food, natural resources, popular entertainment, religion, transportation, work, and many more.  You can choose to limit your search to items accompanied by images.  It's fun to browse through their "featured object groups," such as the National Numismatic Collection, the National Quilt Collection and The Ferris Collection of Prints.

 On the subject of art, the NMAH Web site states, "The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels."

Image: Mexican Guerrilleros, from the Harry T. Peters "America on Stone" Lithography Collection, National Museum of American History.

ARTstor Travel Awards 2010

ARTstor is offering travel awards to support educational and scholarly activities in the amount of $1,500 each to graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences.

From the ARTstor Web site: "To be considered for a research travel award, applicants must create and submit an ARTstor image group (or a series of image groups) and a single accompanying essay that creatively and compellingly demonstrates why the image group(s) is useful for teaching, research, or scholarship. The five winning submissions will be determined by ARTstor staff. These submissions will help ARTstor to understand better the uses that scholars and teachers are making of ARTstor's content and tools and will provide us with insights into how we can continue to improve our efforts to serve the educational community."

Applicants must be affiliated with an ARTstor subscribing institution.  The deadline to apply is April 1, 2010.  Winners will be announced May 1, 2010.  Awards will be made by June 1, 2010 ( awards are to be used by September 1, 2011).  For more information, rules, and application instructions, see the ARTstor Web site.

Image: nhanusek, Luggage, 2006. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

Our New Home in the Visual Arts Complex!

The VRC is thrilled to report that we have finally finished our move and (mostly) finished unpacking in our new facilities in the brand new Visual Arts Complex (VAC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder!  The building is so new that it is still actually a construction site.  But the semester has begun, ready or not, and we are back in the blogging saddle.  Yeehaw! 

There will be a dedication ceremony for the VAC next September, by which time the new CU Art Museum will also be open and there will be landscaping and other finishing touches to help the place look more lived in. We are very excited to finally be home after many years of planning, packing, moving, living in a temporary location while the old building was demolished and the new VAC was constructed, packing again, and moving again.  Everyone in the department will be settling in for some time to come, but it's really great to see art production and scholarship happening right now in our new space.  You can see more pictures from the first two weeks of the semester on the VRC's Flickr Group page.

We are very happy with our new Visual Resources Center facilities.  We have ample space for our public scanning stations and a separate room with a service window for equipment checkout.  Soon we will be able to focus our attention on the large task of methodically going through the slide collection (400,000 slides) and, with our faculty's help, deciding which of the images should be set aside for scanning and which can be disposed of.  In time, we plan to use this room as a space for teaching workshops for members of the department.

ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer

ARTstor has just released an updated version of the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) for Macs, which is compatible with the new Snow Leopard operating system.  If you are not familiar with ARTstor's OIV, it is a very nice piece of (free) software that allows ARTstor users to present high-resolution images from ARTstor's digital library in combination with personal images.  Akin to PowerPoint, the OIV is a more streamlined program intended for image presentations specifically.  Once you have imported your images into a presentation, you can choose to share them in a very quick and simple mode by double clicking on the first image in the Image Palette section.  Or you may wish to create authored slides with titles and other text, details, side by side comparisons, etc.  In either mode you can choose to zoom and pan on the fly during presentations.  Image groups downloaded from ARTstor into the OIV travel with their descriptive data, which your can refer to and use in different ways when preparing and presenting the images.  You can also import existing PowerPoint presentations into the OIV.  Of course, if you prefer another presentation tool, such as PowerPoint or Keynote, ARTstor does allow screen-sized downloads of the vast majority of its images.

ARTstor users may download the OIV by registering for a personal account in ARTstor.  When logged in go to Tools > Download offline presentation tool.  If you are downloading the updated version for Macs, please note that ARTstor recommends that you uninstall the previous version before downloading and installing the updated version.

For more information about the OIV, have a look at ARTstor's help section.  The VRC also encourages faculty and students in the Department of Art and Art History to ask us questions anytime.

Rhizome's ArtBase

If you're interested in new media art, be sure to check out Rhizome's ArtBase.  This growing online collection currently showcases over 2,500 works dating back to 1997.  Rhizome is the eminent new media arts organization affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.  It defines new media art as "contemporary art that uses emerging technologies in significant ways."  These works include net art, software art, computer games, and documentation of new media performance and installation.

You can browse the latest additions on the ArtBase home page, and also browse the entire collection by artist, title, keyword, or date.  Rhizome is currently working on a redesign for ArtBase, and welcomes suggestions via an online survey.

The ArtBase selection criteria include that works are "of potential historical significance."  The curatorial staff evaluates this by looking at:

• the work's aesthetic innovation, conceptual sophistication or political impact
• the work's relevance to the discourse of new media art
• any discussion of the work itself on Rhizome.org or other relevant networks or publications
• the work's place in the artist or artists' oeuvre
• the work's provenance, including commissions, exhibitions and collections

ArtBase features work by our department's own Mark Amerika, as well as a number of other artists with ties to the CU-Boulder Department of Art and Art History, such as Rick Silva, Timothy Weaver, Michael Arnold Mages, and Joseph Farbrook.

Image: Scott Hessels, The Image Mill: Sustainable Cinema #1, 2009. Photo by Joel Swierenga.  Featured in ArtBase.