Thomas J. Watson Library

ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images, primarily in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present and manage these images for research and teaching purposes.

If we look at the ARTstor opening page we get an idea of some of the range and origin of those million images by looking under the first tab, “Collections and Services”.  Description & Status shows the number of collections, which continues to grow (a few years ago ARTstor started with about 13 “charter collections”). Click on the collection name to find out about the collection.  Under Collections by  Topic we see a range of subject matter from art to history.  Under Collection Contributors we find museums, like the Met, as well as individuals, foundations and universities.

What will this class cover? This class covers the essential elements of ARTstor, how to navigate  through the database to find, work with and save images.  Topics are:

• Access and Registration
• Searching
• Navigating Search Results
• Using the Image Viewer
• Creating and working with Image Groups
• Saving and printing images, image groups

Topics not covered in this class.  There was a class last year on the ARTstor Research Collections which focused on the content of the collections, particularly for curatorial research.  The class guide for ARTstor Research Collections, is available on the Watson Library portal under Instruction.

Some other aspects not covered here are creating and managing shared folders (for sharing image groups with students or colleagues), creating personal collections and the Offline Image Viewer (an ARTstor proprietary image viewer).

Access and Registration

Accessing ARTstor
ARTstor can be accessed as all Watson Library resources in several ways.  From the E-Resources page of the Watson Library portal, you will find it under Databases A-Z or under the Databases by Category, within the Image Databases.  You can also enter the keyword artstor into Watsonline. Perhaps easiest, you can enter www.artstor.org in the browser address while you are on site.

ARTstor is also available remotely to staff with a library card. Please see Remote Access Instructions.

ARTstor has an additional access feature.   If you register in ARTstor while you are on site at the Museum, you can use their “grace period” access.    This means that from a remote location, you can go directly to their site (www.artstor.org) and log in with your registration information (email address and password).  “Grace Period” is 120 days since the last time you accessed ARTstor from the site where you registered. See Access ARTstor.

Registering in ARTstor.  You can search, browse and analyze images and data without registering.  However to save images beyond a single session, to create image groups that you can access at a later time, you must be registered.  You are also provided with 120 days of grace period remote access to your ARTstor account.

Registering in ARTstor is a one-time event and requires only a valid email account and a seven character password.   Registering is highly recommended.  (ARTstor’s help on Registering includes a link to a video of the process.)

Let me mention system requirements which are listed on the Artstor site.  The most important ones for ordinary use of Artnet are high speed internet, allowing pop-ups for artstor and having the right version of the browser.  For internet explorer it’s version 7.  You can find the system requirements under Help.

Help from ARTstor:  use this link to find contacts.

Basic and Advanced Searching

Let us do some searching, and in the process, learn about ARTstor’s search features.

First let’s do a “known item” search.  We can enter watteau “judgement of paris“ in the search box and find the one image ARTstor has of this painting.  The word “and” is understood in the search.  The quotations around the words of the title of the painting make it a phrase search.

What is being searched is the content of image descriptions.   Occasionally, the content  includes extra information that may result in “false hits” (a description of a Van Gogh painting that includes a reference to Gauguin is returned for a search on Gauguin paintings).

There are useful search tips on the Help Screen.  You will also find “Tips for Collection Searches” including  collection keywords.

Collection keywords can be used to limit your search to a certain collection.  For instance, if you want to see Greek attic vases you could search Greek attic vases. You could then search within your results for those vases in the Met’s collection by adding metmuseum. Metmuseum is the keyword signalling the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.

Let us do an advanced search:

• Let’s  search on the artist Paul Gauguin and choose in Creator Only from the dropdown menu
• Let’s add Tahiti* in any field (searching for Tahiti or Tahitian in the image description)
• Finally, let’s add Paintings as our classification
• Limit  to metmuseum (or not metmuseum) within these search results.

In the Advanced Search Classifications are assigned by ARTstor and sometimes an item falls into more than one classification. (up to 5 selections).  Geographical terms are regional or country (up to 5 selections).

Geographical classifications are determined in two ways: site-specific works (architecture, murals, public monuments) objects are associated with the location of the work. For objects now in museums and private collections, country terms have been assigned on the basis of the nationality of the creator. When these two criteria overlap (for example, an American architect’s preparatory drawing for a building built in another country), both country terms are assigned.

Search  Results

• Thumbnail images with title, creator and date information
• click to select an image, double click to enlarge the image
• double click to see Image descriptions
• In image descriptions there is a tab for File Properties. This contains information on the digital file like the Image ID, Format, Width, Height, etc. There is also a stable URL that you can cut and paste into a browser or send to someone else within the museum.
• If you are registered there is a tab for personal notes. Personal notes can be searched and viewed only by you. Personal notes may take a few hours to be added to the database.
• Sort capability by title, date or creator
• Display in larger format – large images
• There are icons under some images.

Icons.

Clustering -  artstor often has duplicates of an image from different collections or from multiples within a collection.  Artstor sometimes “clusters’ the images.  In this case, the image considered empirically best, is the first image within the group.  Often the best image is one where the repository and the collection are the same (e.g. an object in the Met’s repository that is part of the Met’s  collection).

IAP Stands for Images for Academic Publishing.  This feature provides high resolution images for publication in scholarly journals.  To read more about this feature, see Images for Academic Publishing.
Currently there are 5,400 images available from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and 3,900 images from the Mellink Archive (Bryn Mawr College).

Associated Images: Discover the collective preferences of ARTstor users by exploring which images are most frequently used and associated with others in ARTstor image groups.

QTVR QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) files are photographic panoramas that allow you to view an environment by panning 360° around a central point.

If you are viewing a QTVR file from the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, you have access to an additional icon in the lower left corner of the QuickTime Player window. Click (the Show Hot Spots icon) to display several blue zones within the image. Click into these blue zones to change your vantage point within the cave that you are viewing.

Knowing the Collection

Successful searching of any database depends on knowing what kind of content it has.

The ARTstor Research Collection class and guide discuss historical collections, collections of digitized slides or photographs of art that has been destroyed, lost or restored, that are valuable for historical information.  Also collections useful for Drawings and Prints, Collections for Asian Art, Collections useful for Modern art.

The Collections by Topic section is also useful for searching if you are concentrating your search in one area such as Classical Studies or Renaissance or Modern Art.  You will find an explanation of what collections are important to that topic and you will get helpful hints on searching that topic.

You also see topics you might not expect such as History, Native American Studies and Literary Studies.  When you search ARTstor you are not limited to classic fine arts categories.  For example, there are photographs of historical events and personages, maps, book covers, postcards, and letters for example.  The scope of the material may influence how you limit your searching.

Browsing a collection is another way to learn the content, keywords and any useful organizational tools.  For instance, the Architecture and Design Collection from Moma has “work types” such as “architectural models”, and “installation views”.  This can be useful to know.

My last search will be a subject search.  Let’s suppose I am looking for Korean “pottery”.  I’m not sure what terminology is used.  So let me go to the Advanced Search screen and type Korea* to be searched “in any field”.  Next, from the Classification choices let me check “Decorative Arts, Utilitarian Objects and Interior Design” and then initiate the Search.  By looking at the results that visually meet my criteria I see that the words earthenware, stoneware, ceramic, and celadon are most often used to describe the items I want.  I can then refine my search by using those terms, each separated by “or”, to “search within these results”.

Image Viewer

This is what opens when you double-click on any image.  Be sure to disable your browser’s pop-up blocker, or allow pop-ups from artstor.org.  ARTstor provides clear instructions here: http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Disabling_Popup_Blockers

The functions available to you at the bottom of the Image Viewer window are listed here.  The ARTstor Image Viewer help page is the best source for information about the available functions and icons: http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Viewing_Image_Viewer

• Zoom
• Pan
• Rotate
• Thumbnail map
• Show and/or hide data
• Maximize/minimize window
• Navigation within search results or an image group — you may navigate by title or by using the arrows
• Print (current view) — the image (or piece thereof) shown in the window will be the view that prints.  This means that you may print a section of an image you have zoomed in on or rotated as it appears.
• Save/download (current view) — Here also you save the current view of the image.  Note that the image download sizes vary; sizes are listed in the image data.
• Side-by-side comparisons — you may have two Image Viewers open at the same time to compare and contrast images.  Each Image Viewer window retains its own separate functionality; for example, you may zoom in on or rotate one image while leaving the other image at full view.

Image Groups

You may create groups of images from those you find via searching the ARTstor digital library.  These groups are connected to your login and so will be available to you at any computer, so long as you are logged in to ARTstor. You may create as many Image Groups as you like and any image may be in any number of Image Groups simultaneously.

Essentially, you find images that you would like to save into a Group, select (highlight) them, and go to Organize > Save selected images to… > New image group, then follow the dialog boxes to name the group and save it.

The following functions for working with Image Groups are available to you in the “Organize,” “Share,” and “Display options” tabs along the top:

• Organize
  • Open image Group
  • Save image group as…
  • Rename Image Group
  • Delete Image Group
  • Select all/Deselect all images on page
  • Delete from Image Group (available if you have one or more images selected)
• Share
  • Generate Image Group URL — you may create a link to an Image Group that you can give to colleagues within your institution (it will only work for others whose logins are associated with the Museum).  We’ve found some occasional glitches with this functionality, so please be patient with it.
  • Print Image Group — this is also how you download the images from an Image Group all at once.
    • For downloading the images: Once the new window opens, use the menu File > Save as… option and save the file as and .htm or .html file.  You will download a folder of images (containing those in the image group) and a web page of the images and their data.
    • Note that you download only a large thumbnail version of each image using this method.
    • These images are good for reference purposes, but if you want images to use in a presentation we recommend downloading images one-at-a-time via the Image Viewer (see above) or batch downloading directly into Powerpoint (see below).
• Display Options
  • Display images on a single page — hides the title captions from the small thumbnail view.  This function is good if you have a very large Image Group, since it brings all the images together on to one page; you are not required to page through all your images in this view.

ARTstor has a great page on “Organizing” (working with Image Groups) within their Help files: http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Organizing

Inserting images into Powerpoint

It’s actually very simple.

For individual images, the steps are as follows:

• Download your ARTstor images (see above)
• Open Powerpoint
• Use the Powerpoint menus Insert > Picture > From file…
• Find the image you downloaded
• Resize and position within the slide

See also ARTstor help: Downloading — http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Downloading — there is an excellent 5-minute YouTube video embedded in this page on how to get ARTstor images into Powerpoint.

ARTstor now allows batch exporting of image groups into Powerpoint. The steps:

• Create or open an image group (for batch export it may not contain more than 100 images).
• Click on the “Batch download to Powerpoint” icon.
• Follow instructions on the pop-up dialng boxes and save the file to your computer.
• Each image will appear on its own slide, with the image data in the notes field below each slide. When in presentation mode, each image will also be hyperlinked to the original image in ARTstor, which you can open to enlarge, pan and rotate online.
• Instructions can be found here on the ARTstor help pages: http://help.artstor.org/wiki/index.php/Downloading#Export_image_group_to_PowerPoint

———
Lisa Harms — lisa.harms[at]metmuseum.org, x2344
Dan Lipcan — daniel.lipcan[at]metmuseum.org, x2982
Renée Watson — renee.watson[at]metmuseum.org, x2667

Posted July 1, 2009 — updated June, 2010
http://libmma.org/portal/artstor-elements-guide/