Blog

By Mark Branner, University of Hawaii, Manoa I have the great privilege of teaching an introductory college-level course on puppetry. Even though it is an introductory course, it is actually classified as an upper division course, which means that I generally have juniors and seniors straggling in, looking for an easy “basket-weaving” escape. There are […]

Rob Stevenson’s Electronic Field Guide Project’s image collection is composed of more than 200 images of turtles, many of them photographed by Susan Speak. Stevenson is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at UMass Boston, where he works on problems related to conservation physiology, environmental informatics, and science education.

by Laura Schroffel, Library Assistant in Special Collections Cataloging at the Getty Research Institute Co-published with The Iris, the online magazine of the Getty. The Getty Research Institute recently collaborated with the Artstor Digital Library to digitize and share approximately 6,500 images from the Julius Shulman photography archive, series II and III. The work of […]

Some of the more controversial nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment was painted over the year after the artist’s death. Those additions were left intact when the Last Judgment was restored in the 1990s, but thanks to a farsighted cardinal we can see what the fresco looked like before it was censored. The Last Judgment was commissioned for the […]

by Emmabeth Nanol, library assistant in Special Collections Cataloging at the Getty Research Institute Co-published with The Iris, the online magazine of the Getty. The Getty Research Institute recently partnered with the Artstor Digital Library to digitize and make available approximately 1,500 selections from the Alexander Liberman photography archive, from the series “Artists and Personalities.” […]

We are thrilled to have been named as one of the two “best overall” databases of 2013 along with JSTOR by Library Journal. Lura Sanborn, reference librarian at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH is quoted as saying that “Both databases are ‘classics worth owning,’” and adding “My library simply could not get by without JSTOR […]

Daylight Saving Time ended last night, which gives you an extra hour today to enjoy our slideshow of beautiful clocks and watches.

In the Journal of American Folklore, Lucile Hoerr Charles asks a question that doubles as a survey of clowns throughout the world: “What has the stage buffoon of the Chinese in common with the court fool of the Middle Ages in Europe; and with the stage fool in Elizabethan England, magnificently represented in Falstaff; and […]

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi is widely recognized as the last great master of Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” the main genre of Japanese woodblock printing (and a major source of inspiration for many modernist artists from Europe). In his last series, New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts, the artist depicts a variety of spirits and magic animals […]

Georgetown University’s James J. O’Donnell is contributing images of Deir Mar Musa, a monastic compound north of Damascus, to the Artstor Digital Library. Here, O’Donnell gives us a short history of the site and shares his experience of visiting. Deir Mar Musa began life as a Byzantine watchtower, served as a medieval hermitage and modern […]