Art Imagery Brightens Lectures

UC Berkeley scholars looking for art images for research or presentation can now find them just a few clicks away-and in stunningly high resolution.

Faculty members, especially in the field of art, are using a new tool: the ARTstor Digital Library, an online archive of 300,000 art-related digital images that combines the collections of a growing number of contributing museums and other institutions.

"ARTstor has taken care to form an image data useful for scholarly and academic purposes," said Kathryn Wayne, fine arts librarian of UC Berkeley's Doe Library. "Many other databases offer images, but without the academic community in mind."

In an effort led by Wayne, UC Berkeley purchased ARTstor in January. Since then, anyone could access ARTstor via any computer connected through the campus's Proxy Server Service by pointing the browser to www.artstor.org.

ARTstor does not require the user to install any additional software to browse its digital archive or present images while online. However, it offers an optional Offline Image Viewer, which can be downloaded for free.

The Offline Image Viewer, developed independently by ARTstor, provides the user with a more dynamic version of PowerPoint. It allows users to zoom in on the images during a presentation.

"If PowerPoint had the zoom, they'd still be on top as far as I'm concerned," said Patricia Berger, chair of the history of art department. "The zoom function is the beauty of ARTstor."

Because of the high resolution of most of ARTstor's images, the viewer often can zoom in to see the finest details in a piece of art, as if examining the art in person.

The more dynamic capabilities of ARTstor are especially helpful when viewing certain large images, Berger said.

"If you want to show a large painting (with PowerPoint), you might need as many as 40 slides to show it adequately in class," Berger said. "That's a lot of images."

"But with ARTstor, you can load just one image of the entire painting and move through it section-by-section during lecture," Berger said.

Last fall, Berger used ARTstor to give the students in her graduate seminar on Buddhist pilgrimage a rare treat: while sitting in their lecture hall, the students "toured" the sculptures and mural paintings of the Buddhist cave shrines located at the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China.

The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, part of ARTstor's collection, is the result of an expensive effort by the Mellon Foundation-which founded ARTstor as a nonprofit initiative-to photograph, foot-by-foot, 45 of the 400 caves in Dunhuang.

The high-resolution photographs were then "stitched" together digitally create a three-dimensional representation of the cave surfaces and spaces, allowing the viewer to "tour" the caves on ARTstor through QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) technology.

The technology gives the viewer considerable freedom to move around the caves and to even zoom in closely on "hot spots" of the caves, as if viewing the artifacts from inches away.

"Because of the QTVR technology, you can 'virtually' walk out the door and look back at the entrance to the cave," said Janice Eklund, UC Berkeley curator at Doe Library's History of Art Visual Resource Center.

Having visited Dunhuang several times, Berger explained that access to and the lighting within the caves are restricted, because excessive breathing and light could damage the artifacts.

"For purposes of study, the images in ARTstor are infinitely better than what you can see when you are physically at Dunhuang," Berger said.

Users agree that using ARTstor can add spontaneity to a lecture.

"I love the fact that I can spontaneously zoom in on details and move quickly from picture-to-picture," Berger said. "If the slides must be in a particular order, it is difficult to scramble for a slide every time students ask questions, especially in a discussion setting."

"Most other online databases don't offer offline software and the zooming function," Wayne said. "Those that do offer software are usually not as user-friendly."

ARTstor also allows faculty members to share image groups-which can contain ARTstor images or uploaded personal collections-with others in the institution, such as students.

This sharing capability has the potential to change fundamentally the availability of image resources on campus.

"Because a digital image may be used simultaneously by multiple users, the digital image, unlike an analog slide, is never 'checked out' to another borrower," Eklund said.

According to Wayne, faculty members in fields other than art, including classics, geography, history, rhetoric and landscaping, have expressed an interest in using ARTstor.

"Undergraduates are very visual and expect to see images," Wayne said. "They are driving this trend."

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