Dear Colleagues, I would like to share the following announcement with the list so that you might take advantage of these new resources.
Enjoy, Nancy Harm Luna Imaging, Inc. New York Regional Office direct: 917-521-1309 [email protected] www.LunaImaging.com ================================================== David Rumsey and Cartography Associates announced the launch this week of Visual Collections www.davidrumsey.com/collections/, a new digital image collection portal that includes more than 300,000 works from museums, universities and private collections throughout the world. Combined, the collected works create an unparalleled online resource in the arts and humanities that is available for free, public access. Fine art, photography, maps, architecture and other collections of culture are represented within Visual Collections, which is made possible through the contributions of dozens of institutions. At its launch, more than 30 collections are represented in Visual Collections, ranging from the fine art of Museums & the Online Archive of California (MOAC) to early maps of Scotland from the University of Edinburgh's Charting the Nation collection. "Visual Collections supports our mission to ensure these important works of art and cultural heritage are more widely available. We are pleased to be among the first to contribute to such a tremendous resource for scholarship," says Dan Greenstein, UC University Librarian for the California Digital Library, which supplied 77,000 images from its MOAC collection. MOAC is itself a collection developed through collaboration among California museums and libraries that share an interest in broadly disseminating images derived from their many wonderful collections. The mission of Visual Collections is to encourage the development of future collections and facilitate their worldwide distribution to both scholars and the general public, says Cartography Associates President David Rumsey, who included his own historical map collection among the resources available. "We believe Visual Collections will serve as an inspiration for others to develop collections of their own and share them. As they do, the image collection portal will continue to grow," Rumsey says. Using Luna Imaging's Insight software, the collections are available in an online environment that allows each to be explored individually, to be used in conjunction with one another or accessed as one large, comprehensive collection. Collections have been organized under five topics: Cartography, Fine Arts, Architecture, Photography, and Other and are also presented as a complete list in the View All tab. Users can search for a particular artist, time period, or medium, and use the powerful tools provided by Insight to zoom, pan, view image data and save groups of images. Most of the collections in Visual Collections are available for free public access. In a few cases, use of materials is limited to educational use and subscriptions are required, but complete low-resolution versions of all the collections are available. For more information, please contact Cartography Associates at [email protected]. --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
