Digital stewardship

An update from our friends at The New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA) Last summer, The New Hampshire Institute of Art’s John Teti Rare Photography Book and Print Collection received a second major gift from collector and philanthropist John Teti. This gift contained original photographic prints of many leading 20th-century photographers, including Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro,…

The Public Collections in Artstor are a library of freely accessible images, documents, and multimedia files generously made available by JSTOR Forum-subscribing institutions. To help users navigate the wide variety of collections available, we’ve created a Public Collections LibGuide.

Good news! Artstor has made more than 1 million image, video, document, and audio files from public institutional collections freely available to everyone—subscribers and non-subscribers alike–at library.artstor.org. These collections are being shared by institutions who make their content available via JSTOR Forum, a tool that allows them to catalog, manage, and share digital media collections…

Editor’s note: this post was originally published in May 2017 and has been updated to reflect Artstor’s platform changes. We invited Marta Chudolinska, Learning Zone Librarian at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, to tell us about the collection of zines they are making openly available via Artstor’s public collections. You can view…

Catherine Tedford, the director of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University, curates the Street Art Graphics collection, undeniably one of the coolest resources in Artstor’s public collections. Here she shares the history of street stickers and of her amazing collection. History of the collection and the Street Art Graphics digital archive…

Editor’s note: this post has been updated to reflect Artstor’s platform changes. We invited Stanton Belford, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology at Martin Methodist College, to tell us about his three Marine Biology collections in JSTOR Forum (formerly Shared Shelf): Red Sea, Trinidad, and Key Largo. Before describing the marine biology digital collections, I would…

Editor’s note: this post was originally published in February 2013 and has been updated to reflect platform changes. Did you know that Artstor contains publicly available collections that cover everything from flowers and turtles to medicine labels and political memorabilia–and are are also a great resource for theatre studies? Below, we discuss five collections which offer…

La Española, the island now divided into the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti, existed first as a Spanish colony during the entire sixteenth century, when its population became the first one in the Americas with a majority of people of African descent. The Black ancestors of today’s Dominicans were the first to experience…

This post has been updated to include new information about Artstor’s public collections, formerly made available on Shared Shelf Commons. The Delmarva Peninsula gets its name from the three states it’s a part of: DELaware, MARyland, and VirginiA. You could say Delmarva is technically an island, since you have to cross one of five bridges…

Whether you consider illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages the beginning, or you start with William Blake’s self-published books of poetry in the 18th century, artists have been making books for centuries. But as Toni Sant recounts in his book Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-garde, the term “artists’ books” is fairly recent.…

This post has been updated to include new information about Artstor’s public collections, formerly made available on Shared Shelf Commons. Despite entreaties to the contrary, the debate about e-books vs. printed books doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Traditionalists frequently tout the sensual pleasures of paper (smell, which doesn’t have much to do…

This post was edited to reflect the change from Shared Shelf to JSTOR Forum. We invited Lee T. Pearcy of Bryn Mawr College’s Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, to discuss the Classicizing Philadelphia project. One way to think about America’s relationship with ancient Greece and Rome is to imagine a dialogue. Listen carefully as you wander around Philadelphia.…

This post has been updated to include new information about Artstor’s public collections, formerly made available on Shared Shelf Commons. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the prevailing medical belief that “the more dangerous the disease, the more painful the remedy” meant that bloodletting, purging, and blistering were often prescribed. Not surprisingly, this led…

This post has been updated to include new information about Artstor’s public collections, formerly made available in Shared Shelf Commons. Maine is famous for its winters, and understandably so – snow accumulation can reach up to 10 feet in parts of the state. This offers an irresistible opportunity for play, as you can see in…