Los Angeles County Museum of Art Offers Materials Online

Big thanks to the Scout Report for pointing us to the LACMA, which is offering almost 25,000 records with over 10,000 images from some of its collections (Specifically the South and Southeast Asian, Japanese, Islamic, Photography and Costume and Textiles collections.) You can reach the materials at http://mweb.lacma.org/.

Clicking the start button on the site's front page allows you to browse through several categories, but you can keyword search too -- look at the left side of the page. Basic keyword search allows you to either specify a keyword or choose from a pull-down menu of keywords. You can also specify that you want only records which have accompanying images.

The advanced search lets you specify museum objects, the library catalog, or the Sanford Roth Study Collections. I chose museum objects, and was given a search page with several different query boxes, including title, credit line, culture, place, and publication. You can sort by any one of these variables, and choose to view entire records or images only.

Searching for "coin," images only, from this page found 62 results. Pictures are clear but vary in size and come 12 to a page. Click on the caption below the picture for the record. Clicking on the picture itself gives you a popup window with a larger image.

If you don't want to search and you don't see a topic that interests you, try the random images link. It seems to serve up 12 images at a time, though once I got only ten. This is a fun feature -- once I got " Methods of Cursive Drawing of Landscapes" right next to "Propane Tank."

Posted to Aesthetics-Museums