The University Library recently subscribed to the ARTstor Digital Library, which makes thousands of rare high-resolution digital art images available to students, researchers and faculty — a service that especially will benefit art history scholars.
The images range from 15th century Old Master European prints to ancient Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China — all of which can appear in crystal-clear focus on student’s desktop computers.
“It’s exciting. It’s fun stuff,” said David Bishop, a library administrator. “What we’re trying to do is to pump as much of this stuff as we can into students’ dorm rooms.”
Bishop explained that ARTstor, which can be accessed by students at www.ARTstor.org, is a non-profit collaborative effort between the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a number of universities, including Northwestern.
Bishop said there are two important advantages to this new system: ARTstor can be used with Smart Classrooms to create the kind of lectures that students will find interesting, and students can replicate what they saw in the lecture on their own computers.
He added ARTstor also will allow researchers to do things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.
“It enables them to zoom in to look at the particular brush strokes,” he said.
“This ability to go in and look at particular details is extremely important,” he added. “For scholars, this is a wonderful resource.”
Prof. Sarah Fraser, chairwoman of NU’s art history department, assembled images for the Dunhuang archive, a collection of 360 panoramic views of Buddhist cave shrines.
“We used a variety of techniques to capture these visually rich environments,” Fraser said in an e-mail. “With high-resolution photography we were able to record the surfaces in detail.”
Fraser added that she is excited about the opportunities provided by digital databases such as ARTstor.
“New technologies and multimedia applications that we use regularly on the Internet and for entertainment can now be used to preserve the world’s cultural heritage,” she said, adding that in the spring she will be teaching a new junior research seminar using ARTstor and the Dunhuang images.
“For the first time, students will have a chance to view the paintings the way they were originally intended,” she said.
Vickie Bhatia, a Weinberg freshman who is enrolled in an art history course, said she’s excited about ARTstor because it allows her to zoom in on thousands of paintings.
“Not every painting is available in the textbooks,” she said. “You need to be able to study the paintings in detail.”
But some students said the system may only benefit art history majors.
“If I want to see art, I’ll go to a museum,” Medill sophomore Deborah Meron said.
Russ Clement, head of the art library, said in an e-mail that ARTstor plans to nearly double the number of images it offers to 500,000 by 2006.
More details about the service can be found at the University Library’s Web site.
Reach Tom Grant at [email protected].
