Celebrating faculty authors
On February 24 at 3:00 p.m. in the Archives Reading Room, the University Library will hold its first Celebrating Scholarship program of 2005. This series honors American University faculty who have recently published books. Three faculty members will be honored: Professor Denise Gosliner Orenstein, Department of Literature, College of Arts and Sciences, for Unseen Companion; Professor Consuelo Hernandez, Department of Languages and Foreign Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, for her book of poems Manual de Peregrine; and Professor Renee Marlin-Bennett, School of International Service, for Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy. All are cordially invited to attend the presentations and to join the reception that follows. ARTStor database—not just for art historians
Images serve as important expressions of ideas and cultures and play an important role in communication. This is especially true today with video, photography, Internet, and multimedia formats all competing with print information. ARTStor, a new library image database, offers an opportunity to incorporate images into teaching, learning, and research at AU. It provides a wealth of visual resources for use in all disciplines: everything from Albrecht Durer prints to images of body art. Similar to its journal counterpart JSTOR, ARTStor is conceived as a nonprofit repository for digital images and associated information from a wide array of sources. The database was launched in 2004 with approximately 300,000 images and a goal of offering a half million images by summer 2006. Collections include worldwide art, architecture, design, material culture, and master drawings from many universities and major museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Harvard University art museums. The art images are augmented by special collections in areas such as American studies, anthropology, and religion, including 10,000 historic photographs of Native American art and culture and the Mellon International Duhuang Archive of wall paintings from Buddhist cave shrines. ARTStor software lets faculty and other users select and save images from the collections in their own work folders using click and drag features. They can then add their own notes to images. They can present them to classes in flexible ways with features that zoom in on details, pan across a slide, or project dual images for comparison. Recognizing that no collection can meet all needs, there is a pilot program underway which will allow subscribing institutions to store local digital image collections and search and view them along with the ARTStor database. Institutions participating in the pilot program have added images from collections outside art including biology, astronomy, and map collections. For more information on this project, contact Diana Vogelsong at dvogel@american.edu. Grove Music Online
The library recently added Grove Music Online to its list of databases. Grove is an integrated music resource on the Web, including the full text of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition; 29 volumes), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (four volumes) and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (second edition; three volumes). Grove Music Online will be updated annually to ensure it remains the most up-to-date music reference work on the Internet. Contributors: George Arnold and Diana Vogelsong |
