David Rumsey Announces Image Collection Portal

David Rumsey and Cartography Associates, known for really lovely map sites, has announced Visual Collections, a "digital image collection portal that includes more than 300,000 works from museums, universities and private collections throughout the world." It's available at http://www.davidrumsey.com/collections/ , and you'll need to use IE, Mozilla, or Netscape.

The collections are divided into a set of tabs that appear at the top of the page, including cartography, fine arts, and photography. Pick a category -- I picked photography -- and you'll get a list of institutions containing records, the number of records they have, cost of access, and a popup window containing a collection description. Some of the collections are very small (27 images) and some are huge (over 9,000 images.)

For most of the collections you'll have the option of viewing the items using either the Insight Browser or Insight Java Client. I decided to look at the Howell Icelandic Collection, and chose the browser. When I did that, a new window popped up, and after a few minutes of loading (even on broadband) I was looking at the collection.

This collection came in sets of twenty, with the usual "double click to make it bigger." Once you have made it bigger you have additional Insight browser options -- to zoom in further, get image data, print the image, and so on. You also have the option to search the collection by several different variables -- keywords, creation date, maker, etc.

Posted in the following categories: Aesthetics-Art-Collections | TrackBack
Take this title and: Google It | Yahoo It | Teoma It | Gigablast It | Amazon It