YouTube Now Lets You Search for and Assign Creative Commons Licenses

Creators and remixers now have have a great new option to share and play with content, without worrying about copyright. YouTube has introduced a feature in its Video Editor that allows users to assign a Creative Commons license (CC-BY) to their videos. To mark videos with a CC license, simply click the radio button labeled "Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" at the time of uploading, or go to My Videos,  select edit for the video for which you wish to assign the CC license, scroll down to Broadcasting and Sharing Options, and select the CC option.

Those wishing to find content they may use under a CC license can find it in the Video Editor by simply clicking the CC tab at the top of the page. You can conduct a keyword search, with only CC-licensed videos appearing among the search results. To add a video to your storyboard, click on the 'plus' symbol (+) and remix away!

For more information, including important details about the rights and responsibilities involved, see YouTube's page on Creative Commons. You can view the terms of the CC-BY license at the Creative Commons Web site.

Internet Archive: A Rich Source of Video, Audio, Text, and More

Have you gotten lost in the Internet Archive yet? It's non-profit "digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form," which features a huge array video, audio, text, and other items of potential interest to both artists and scholars alike. The site offers so much that it's difficult to do justice to it in a brief blog post. Its main offerings are divided into the Wayback Machine (over 150 billion archived web pages), Moving Images, Texts, Audio, and Software. You can conduct keyword and advanced searches across the entire archive, or browse by various sub-collections. Explore the reviews, spotlight items, most downloaded items, and staff picks. Below is a brief overview of each of the main Internet Archive areas.

Wayback Machine
"Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible."

Moving Images
"This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download." The sub-collections are Animation & Cartoons, Arts & Music, Community Video, Computers & Technology, Cultural & Academic Films, Ephemeral Films, Movies, News & Public Affairs, Prelinger Archives, Spirituality & Religion, Sports Videos , Television, Videogame Videos, Vlogs, and Youth Media.

Texts
"Contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books." This comprises almost 3 million digitized items, including a lot of great vintage and historical texts. These can be read online or downloaded to your computer. The sub-collections are American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Universal Library, Community Texts, Project Gutenberg, Children's Library, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Additional Collections.

Audio
"Contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download." The sub-collections are Audio Books & Poetry, Community Audio, Computers & Technology, The Grateful Dead, Live Music Archive, Music & Arts, Netlabels, News & Public Affairs, Non-English Audio, Radio Programs, and Spirituality & Religion.

Software
"The Software Archive is designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles. The collection includes a broad range of software related materials including shareware, freeware, video news releases about software titles, speed runs of actual software game play, previews and promos for software games, high-score and skill replays of various game genres, and the art of filmmaking with real-time computer game engines." The sub-collections are Game Patches, 301Works.org, DigiBarn, CD Bulletin Board Software Archive, Infochimps, Open Source Software, and Tucows Software Library.

Europeana: 15 Million Images, Videos, Audio Files, and Texts

If you have not yet visited Europeana, here's your chance to "study abroad." Europeana is a an impressive digital library of over 15 million items from 1500 museums, archives, libraries, and other organizations representing the cultural and scientific heritage of Europe. As described on their about us page, these items include:

• Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
• Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
• Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
• Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

After conducting a basic or advanced search, search results are presented as a mix of all of these object types, but you can choose from  Images, Videos, or Sounds tabs to examine those types in particular. You can also refine your search by provider, country, language, type, dates, or rights.

If you register for an account you can save your searches, save particular items, or save tags.

Safeguard Your Wireless Security

Do you use wireless Internet connections at coffee shops, airports, hotels, or at home? If so you should be concerned about about the security of your personal information. Hacking is getting much easier, and new tools, such as the free Firefox add-on Firesheep, allow people with comparatively little expertise to very easily observe your online movements. A recent article in the New York Times, New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users, provides a great overview of both the threats to your private data and the actions you can take to protect yourself. I encourage you to read the article for more detailed information, but here are some important points:

HTTPS is an encryption method offered by many Web sites, but many do not provide "end-to-end" encryption, meaning that while your password may be protected as you enter a site, your privacy is vulnerable thereafter. The article points to another free Firefox extension, called HTTPS Everywhere, which makes HTTPS the default on Web sites that offer HTTPS as an encryption method. However, this only works with sites that offer HTTPS. A small lock visible in the corner of your browser or within the address bar ensures that your connection is encrypted.

A good rule of thumb noted in the article is to avoid doing anything online with sensitive data in public places. One should also take steps to bolster the security of your home wireless network, which is susceptible to hackers with inexpensive Wi-Fi antennas that can detect signals from home networks two to three miles away. It's wise to select a long and complex alphanumeric password and change the default router name of your home wireless network.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) can encrypt all wireless communications at home or in public places. There are both subscription-based and free versions, although the latter tend to provide more limited protection. If you are a member of the CU-Boulder community, you may freely use the campus VPN service. It encrypts your traffic as it is routed to the campus VPN server, and is unencrypted after that. If you are sitting in a coffee shop and connect through the CU-Boulder VPN, you have some protection from nearby prying Firesheep eyes. This is better than nothing -- it's worth noting that over a million people have downloaded Firesheep since its release just over three months ago.

Image: David Pham, iStillness, 2006. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Once Again, Privacy Settings on Facebook

As you may know, Facebook's privacy settings have changed from time to time in recent years. Do you know exactly what information you are currently sharing with whom, both within and outside of Facebook? If you haven't reviewed your settings for a while, it's worth spending just a few minutes looking them over and make adjustments as necessary. Over at Mashable, Stan Schroeder just shared a must-read post on privacy for Facebook users: Facebook Privacy: 10 Settings Every User Needs to Know.

The topics that Schroeder covers, accompanied by screen shots and easy, step-by-step instructions, are:

1. Sharing on Facebook
2. Existing Photos
3. Checking In to Places
4. Connecting on Facebook
5. Apps You Use
6. Instant Personalization
7. Info Accessible to Your Friends
8. Public Search
9. Friend Lists
10. Enabling HTTPS

Image: Jeremy Brooks, Private, 2008. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

Google Art Project: 'Street View' for Museums Plus Artworks in High Resolution

Today Google announced the launch of Google Art Project, an exciting development for anyone interested in art or art museums. From the Official Google Blog: "You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums."

To get started,  just choose a museum from the home page and then select ‘View Artwork’ or ‘Explore the Museum'. From there you can use the drop-down menus at the upper left of the page to select a museum (box on left) or choose among the artworks within a given museum (box on right). You can virtually explore selected portions of museum spaces in 'Street View' mode with the ‘Explore the Museum' option -- note that the resolution in this mode is not particularly high. But in the ‘View Artwork’ mode you can zoom into lovely detail views, and even enjoy truly magnificent, super-high resolution, gigapixel details among selected images (indicated by a 'plus' symbol on the list of artworks).

Note the 'i' button at the top right of the page, which provides valuable information about the selected museum (Web site, floor plan, Google Maps location, museum history, and more works in the museum) or the selected artwork (such as viewing notes, additional artwork information, artwork history, tags, artist information, more works by the artist, and more works in the museum).

Finally, you can also ‘Create an Artwork Collection,’ where you can save and share specific views and comments on any of the 1000+ artworks included in Google Art Project. Note that FAQs can be found here.

The participating museums currently are:

• Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany
• Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC - USA
• The Frick Collection, NYC - USA
• Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Germany
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - USA
• MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC - USA
• Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid - Spain
• Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza, Madrid - Spain
• Museum Kampa, Prague - Czech Republic
• National Gallery, London - UK
• Palace of Versailles - France
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands
• The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg - Russia
• State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - Russia
• Tate Britain, London - UK
• Uffizi Gallery, Florence - Italy
• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands

While it current state is impressive, the relatively small number of museums and artworks is immediately obvious. It is exciting to imagine what this could become in time, with more contributions from these and other institutions around the world. While you can't beat viewing artworks in person, it is not possible for most of us to visit all of the museums that pique our interest. Further collaboration between Google and museums will make more cultural objects accessible to many more people, which will ideally inspire more museum visits and overall support for museums.

Get More Out of Your Digital Camera

Do you have a new digital camera?  Have you been using your digital camera for a while but feeling like you could get more out of it? Darren Rowse's compilation of 21 Settings, Techniques and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know is a great place to start. Even if you are an experienced photographer, there are tips here worth reviewing. Included are Aperture and Shutter Priority Mode, Introduction to White Balance, Automatic Exposure Bracketing, How to Take Sharp Digital Images, How to Get Shallow Depth of Field in Your Digital Photos, Understanding Exposure, The Rule of Thirds, and many others. If you think "histograms are scary," this article is for you -- it will demystify your camera and help you create much better images.

Image: Kris Krüg, kim cathers, 2007. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Archive Raiders: Photographing Library and Archive Materials

Not long ago I was asked by someone if the VRC has a scanner that could be borrowed for a research trip, in order to scan materials in an archive. I do not have much experience photographing works housed in special collections or archives, but I do know that hauling a scanner around is likely not the best solution. Anyone who has tried to photograph archival materials knows that consistently sharp focus with a hand held camera is next to impossible. So what's a scholar to do when he or she needs to document materials but the facilities might charge too much for their photography services and provide no self-serve copy stands?

Konrad M. Lawson has authored a guest post over at ProfHacker in which he outlines his solution to this problem. With just a few relatively inexpensive components he bought on Amazon, he has come up with a clever set-up that is very portable and effective. It is important to note, as some of the comments on his post have, that archives and libraries often have explicit rules about what kinds of equipment may or may not be used. These policies are normally in place to protect the materials, and it's vital to respect their well-being for future users. Lawson describes the practice employed by some of using plexiglass to hold the pages of books flat. He does not mention it, but this is damaging to rare materials and should be avoided. Lawson has found a better solution. He operates a wired camera remote with his foot, leaving his hands free to hold the pages flat.

Image: Jeff Tabaco, Notes, 2006. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Digital Imaging Standards: Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI)

Ever wonder how the VRC arrives at its digital imaging standards? We look to technical guidelines from sources like the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI). This summer they released the latest version of their Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Creation of Raster Image Master Files (PDF). Intended for an audience that includes "archivists, librarians, curators, managers, and others, as well as practitioners directly involved in scanning and digital capture, such as technicians and photographers," these guidelines may be very useful for photographers and artists seeking standards for archiving images depicting their original artwork. However, they will be too technical for some. As state in the introduction, "a basic foundation in photography and imaging is essential. Generally, without a good technical foundation and experience for production staff, there can be no claim about achieving the appropriate level of quality as defined in these guidelines."

The Guidelines address the digitization of still images within the realm of historical, cultural, or archival materials. The document begins with a technical overview providing details on raster image characteristics (include spatial resolution, signal resolution, and color mode), the digitization environment, assessing scanner and camera performance, and reference targets, followed by in-depth sections on imaging workflow, digitization specifications, file format comparisons, various types of metadata, storage recommendations, and quality management.

If you are a member of the Department of Art and Art History, feel free to ask us about this and other digital imaging best practices documents. Lia Pileggi, our Digital Imaging and Technology Coordinator, is available by appointment to discuss the best digitization and archiving strategies for your project. And of course, we offer free scanning services to instructors in the department.

For more information about FADGI, see their web site. In addition to their Still Image Working Group FADGI has an Audio-Visual Working Group, which hasn't yet produced an analogous Guidelines document but currently hosts a page on audio-visual Resources and Industry Standards with a lot of very helpful links.

Image: Alan Vernon. Morant's Curve - Digitized Velvia Slide film. 2010. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

ARTstor Mobile

Announcement from ARTstor:
"The ARTstor Digital Library is now accessible to registered ARTstor users through the iPad, iPhone, and the iPod Touch, providing read-only features such as searching and browsing, zooming, and viewing saved image groups. We are also introducing the Flashcard View for ARTstor Mobile, which allows users to test their knowledge by viewing the image without textual information, and then flipping the image to reveal the image record. This new view can be found under the “Views” menu as “Flashcard.” ARTstor Mobile is only available through the Safari browser, just go to http://library.artstor.org from your mobile device. For more details, visit our Help page at http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/ARTstor_Mobile."

Image: atmtx, The Future of Computing, 2010. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.