In our bag of bibliographical tricks is ARTstor–not a typographical error but rather a database of images from major art collections around the world. What ARTstor provides are high quality images that incorporate the world’s major genres and artists. There are 980,000 images currently searchable in the ARTstor database, and these images can be zoomed, panned, and displayed in a number of ways. Amoung the major collections represented are:
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Carnegie Arts of America
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Dallas Museum of Art
- Detroit Institute of Art
- Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
- George Eastman House
- J Paul Getty Museum
- Library of Congress
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Seattle Institute of Art
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Williams College Museum
Along with these collections there are dozens of more specialized collections of the visual arts, a sampling of these includes:
- American Institute of Indian Studies
- Warburg Institute: Renaissance and Baroque Illustration
- Medieval Stained Glass
- Connecticut College’s Asian Art Collection
- Islamic Art Collections
There are also collections of the decorative arts, World War posters and postcards, and major collections of photography. There are utilities in ARTstor for saving images into spaces where they then can be made available to students as a collection, and can even be shared with folks associated with other colleges. Using ARTstor used to be like, well, like trying to get around MOMA on a busy day, however the ARTstor staff has worked hard and done a lot to improve their user interface. This is a unique and especially useful database…