Every issue of Spare Rib available online!!

Search and Browse every edition of Spare Rib

Few titles sum up an era and a movement like Spare Rib. When the first issue came out in July 1972, many women were starting to question their position and role in society. The magazine was an active part of the emerging women's liberation movement. It challenged the stereotyping and exploitation of women in what was the first national magazine of its kind. It supported collective, realistic solutions to the hurdles women faced and reached out to women from all backgrounds. Spare Rib became the debating chamber of feminism in the UK. It continued until January 1993 and the full archive of 239 magazines provides a valuable insight into women's lives and this period of feminist activity.

access this amazing resource here

https://journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/britishlibrary/sparerib

Photopin

Want copyright cleared images and quickly? PhotoPin will search Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images for you

Just search for any topic using the search box on the Photopin website, preview the photo, and click "get photo" to download the photo as well as the proper attribution link.

Click on the photograph itself to check the precise terms of the Creative Commons licence applied to it. You can then Copy the proper attribution info from Photo Pin and paste it into your document

Historic Photography Uncovered

John Dillwyn Llewelyn

Speaking at the official launch of the new Historic Photography show at the National Museum Cardiff its Director General  David Anderson told his audience  to remember the moment. It was the start of a great and new emphasis on what he called the most important collection in the Museum, its photographs. Thanks to the Esme Fairbairn Trust an ongoing digitisation programme has started. Photographs originating  from all departments in the Museum covering Geology ,  Botany, Social History,  Fine Art and more  are being digitised and will form a publicly accessible database in the near future.David Anderson  told us to look out for much more around Photography than has ever been offered before.

For now go and see this first flowering, the most magical and varied collection of photographs and cameras and explanations of photographic processes. This exhibition traces the evolution of photography, as a scientific process, as a social record and a medium for artistic expression.

The photographic material on display dates from the mid-19th to mid-20th century .My favourites show  the beaches I love; Caswell Bay, Tenby, Three Cliffs looking just like they do today but dotted with little ladies in full blown Victorian and Edwardian garb, extraordinary.
The exhibition continues until 19th April

Images help us 'see': The Refugee Project: an interactive map

photo by Heaferl: Demo "Gleiche Rechte für alle" (Refugee-Solidaritätsdemo) am 16. Februar 2013 in Wien
	'Every day, all over the world, ordinary people must flee their homes for fear of death or persecution. Many leave without notice, taking only what they can carry. Many will never return

They cross oceans and minefields, they risk their lives and their futures. When they cross international borders they are called refugees.
The Refugee Project is an interactive map of refugee migrations around the world in each year since 1975. UN data is complemented by original histories of the major refugee crises of the last four decades, situated in their individual contexts'.

The Refugee Project
http://www.therefugeeproject.org/

(Best viewed in Chrome and Firefox)

Click the About tab (top right ) to read  how to navigate the map. 

You will discover where refugees come from, where they go and articles documenting their stories and the political contexts to their plight.

CC Search (Copyright free images)

from CC Search 

keyword =business meeting

I am often asked to recommend a website to go to for Copyright free images. The Electronic Library at Cardiff Met offers many links to image databases  that we recommend, some (marked with a black or a green copyright symbol)  like Bridgeman Education and Visual Arts Data Service offer copyright free images for educational use.

 I can also recommend a single page to which you can navigate on the internet which will allow you to search a whole selection of different image databases ...not just images of art and design... made available under a  Creative Commons licence.

Creative Common licences all offer, as minimum, permission to copy so long as the image is marked clearly with details of who first created it (attribution). To learn more about Creative Commons licences (which are voluntarily  applied by creators to their works and can apply to text, images , music and all copyrighted materials) you should go here.
To search for all those Creative Commons licensed images  go here. Enter a keyword and select a source to search from the range offered ( various interesting websites ) results will bring back Creative Commons licenced images, moving images and sound.

Google Images taken to task

CEPIC, the Centre of the Picture Industry, submitted a formal antitrust complaint against Google’s use of third-party images before the European Commission on November 8th 2013.The complaint was supported by an unprecedented coalition of European and US trade associations representing thousands of photographers and picture agencies worldwide.

The complaint addresses Google’s various unauthorized uses of third-party images in its horizontal Web Search and its specialized services, in particular Google Images. Google increasingly uses on-line images without the rightholders’ consent, sometimes even against their explicit wishes. Since the redesign of Google Images in January 2013, the situation got worse: Google presents images in full size and high resolution on its site and enables users to download them without ever having to click through to the original website hosting the image.

According to CEPIC members, 85% of pictures found online by visual search systems are unlawful copies and 80% of those illegal images have been spread through search engines such as Google Images. By presenting images out of the context of their source page, without information on the author and a hardly visible copyright note, the new design of Google Images significantly increases this problem.

The picture industry would like an adequate balance between Google’s use of their content and the benefits they receive in return, in particular traffic on their websites. 

read a fuller version of this story here

For students Google images provides quick reference points for images. The ease of reuse of other people’s creations on the web is leading to some content creators and rights owners, such as the major image libraries, taking steps to protect copyright by using sophisticated image-matching robots to crawl the web and find where their images are being used without permission.

In the past 2 or 3 years many individuals, businesses and institutions, including Universities , have found themselves being issued with large bills for the use of such material on their websites without permission.

 For quality sites which append trustworthy  information Cardiff Met Library provides links within its Electronic Library. Excellent sites include Tate  Art and Artists, V&A Collections, MOMA NY,  Google Cultural Institute,  NYPL, Ubuweb (copyright clearance on this site is not certain) and databases for which we pay to have access to copyright cleared images such as Bridgeman Education and Worth Global Style Network

learn how to search the internet for legal Audio, Video and Image resources of quality

Learn how to use the Internet to find copyright cleared images for your work, Jisc who champion the use of digital technologies in UK education and research have created a free online tutorial covering al you need to know to become an expert image searcher.

Use this free, interactive tutorial to improve your image searching skills.

Two other tutorials cover audio and moving image resources, find them in The Virtual training Suite

 L

Alinari online-free to explore

"Dreaming of pirates", Terrazza Mascagni, Livorno

Photographer: Vestrini, Michele

Date of photography: 1958

Alinari black and white photographs were used by art historians before the days of good quality colour reproductions in books so that they could  view the representations of buildings and works of art that the Italian company photographed. Art history departments bought them for study-put on reserve and/or available for browsing always as representations of a building or a painting, not seen then as interesting as examples of photography.

Over 167,000 photographs have now been digitised and are available on subscription as Alinari 24 Ore to individuals and Institutions at a reasonable price.

Subject areas which would find these images useful as well as art and architectural history include cultural studies,  history, economics, sociology and science. It is also possible to search by photographer’s name.

You  may be interested in the free access for educational use. The database can be searched and images have a small watermark on them (as in the image above) until you buy the image or subscribe.

Look here for details.

what we thought in the 80's

Observing the 80’s

Insights into the social history and cultural change of those living in the 1980s give a fascinating overview of life in Thatcher’s Britain.

The Observing the 80’s project at the University of Sussex, funded by Jisc, collates first-hand accounts, written by volunteers, of their daily lives and views which were collected throughout the decade as part of the Mass Observation Archive. This material offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from all social classes and regions during the 80s period.

Observing the 1980s brings together, for the first time, ‘voices’ from both the Mass Observation Collections and the British Library Oral History Collections. This material offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from all social classes and regions during the 1980s.

The project is explained in the video above

A Guide to using the resources here

The infographics are particularly nice

 

Zandra Rhodes goes digital

You can access VADS From our Electronic Library   by selecting the Database A-Z section and clicking ‘V’ for VADS

Researchers and students from the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) have worked alongside Zandra Rhodes to prepare, photograph, and catalogue 500 dresses and garments selected from the designer’s private archive at her studio in London, including pieces worn by icons such as Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diana Ross.

The project has also created contextual learning materials which explore Zandra Rhodes' creative processes and production techniques, through video interviews, video tutorials, and drawings available at: zandrarhodes.ucreative.ac.uk. Here also you can see video interviews with Zandra Rhodes about the inspiration behind key, favourite garments selected by the designer. There are also  video tutorials in which the designer and her specialist studio team demonstrate some of the techniques involved in creating a handmade Zandra Rhodes couture piece. In addition, there is a unique, comprehensive, and previously unseen series of fashion drawings from the 'Zandra Rhodes Style Bibles.'

Zandra Rhodes trained at one of UCA's founder colleges, the Medway College of Design, and is among the most famous names in British fashion over the last fifty years . Her er work includes the design of haute couture for clients such as Elizabeth Taylor, Freddie Mercury, and Diana, Princess of Wales.

See the press release on the UCA website at:

http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/news/2013/march/joanna-lumley

See the project in action in the ITV news report at:

http://www.itv.com/news/meridian/update/2012-07-09/zandras-iconic-outfits-out-of-the-closet/

To find out more about how the digital collection was created, see the project blog at:

http://zandrarhodesarchive.wordpress.com

what we can do for you!!

Cardiff Metropolitan Library Service can obtain materials for you that we do not have in the Collection already.

 Our Document delivery team based at Llandaff will send for journal articles and books using our Inter Library Loan service, they can also obtain DVD's for you to view from TRILT , a database of  programmes broadcast on British Television and you can order digital versions of theses using the British Library ETHOS service.

Come along to our event on April 29th to meet members of Doc Del and hear about what they can do for you!

Invitation

Come along find out about the new developments in Document Delivery, Inter Library Loans & Digitisation.

New Developments:

·       eRequesting

·       TRILT

·       EThOS

Where: Yellow Room, Howard Gardens Library

When: 1pm – 4.00pm, April 29^th, 2013

Cardiff again!

Don't forget we have a fabulous Public Library here in Cardiff. The Central Library in town has been named one of the top libraries in the world as well as one of the greenest buildings. To join all you need to do is turn up with one form of identification. If you're already a member of another library service in Wales, England, or Northern Ireland, you can join Cardiff Libraries simply by presenting your existing valid library card.
As well as including 90,000 books, the Central library  has a white concert grand piano, which if you know how to, you are allowed to play for free, there are plenty of music scores to choose from if you do. There is a also a good DVD and music library and childrens section.
Electronic resources that can be searched in the library include Which? online and Grove Art Online. On the 5th floor there is a Local Studies Library with books and maps and photographs galore on Wales and Cardiff.

Culture Grid and Porphyry

This is porphyry. Stephen Cox sculpts in this stuff because he likes a challenge-its very hard (literally). In 1988, he was commissioned to carve sculpture for the new Cairo Opera House, Egypt, and was allowed to quarry Imperial porphyry at Mons Porphyrytes in the Eastern Desert, which had not been used since the end of Roman Empire.  Below is 'Chrysalis' a work from 1991, the  image is  from the Tate website . The artist describes this work as having to do with transition and reincarnation. It suggests a recumbant Egyptian funerary figure in the process of changing and mutating

Marble Roman emporers used to be dressed in porphyry togas because it is the colour of Roman Imperial Purple.

The first image of  porphyry in this blog entry  is not from an art image database  but from a geological one which I found by searching The Culture Grid. If you are after images from Ethnography, Geology and other non art and design objects then have a look at the Culture Grid.

Culture Grid opens up a wealth of information from museums, galleries, libraries and archives: giving greater access to UK culture, arts and heritage. It contains approximately  3 million items from hundreds of collections on all topics.

University College London (UCL) and University of Reading have just added 6,500 images of objects from their museum collections to Culture Grid. The images can be freely viewed, downloaded and used under a Creative Commons licence.The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets.

 Preserved infant lemur Grant Museum of Zoology UCL. Image from the Culture Grid

 

 

Exploring London/in the Field in Cardiff

 

                         London is one of the greenest cities in the world from Exploring 20th Century London

 

Our Level 4 undergraduates are currently 'in the Field' exploring various places around Cardiff, researching them in groups made up of students from all our different art and design disciplines. They will soon return and engage in creating physical outcomes to their investigations back in their practice studios. I think they may be interested to see how many different aspects there are to a city and how these present visually on this rather fab website.

 Exploring 20th Century London

Phase I of the Exploring 20th century London project is a partnership project between four museums in London:

• Museum of London (MoL)
• London Transport Museum (LTM)
• Jewish Museum, London
• Museum of Croydon

The project’s aim is to make the collections held by these museums more accessible, but to do so in a way that links the objects in the collections with the broader history of London. All objects and images featured on the site speak of the real events and experiences of twentieth-century London.
The content covers different types of objects: from Routemaster buses to architectural designs; from 1970s platform shoes to oral history recordings; from paintings and artworks to family photographs. It also includes a mass of supporting information.
more information about this project here

Your Paintings and your librarian!

The BBC hosts a website that documents all paintings in public ownership-those paintings that lurk in council offices, libraries, and slide libraries as well as the ones we get to see in the major art galleries and museums! The portrait above that a recent Fine Art graduate painted of me is just one of the 212,000 piantings now online and viewable by location, artist name or title.
Here are the FAQ's that answer questions such as who is behind the project, why no watercolours and also crucially  how many are on public display (20%)-a low figure which goes to show how valuable a service this website is...
Next time we have a Welsh Librarians' conference at the wonderful Gregynog Hall I am going in search of this fine specimen!                                         

 
















 

and this beauty painted by the same artist   

 

 

Decorating with Old Masters

Dutch art director Christian Borstlap created this film for the new Rijksmuseum project Rijksstudio. The film includes 211 artworks from the museum's online collection.

Video: Part of a Bigger Plan
Music: 'Dreaming' by Allo, Darlin

The Rijksmuseum uses Rijksstudio to make more than 125,000 objects from the collection digitally accessible, free of charge. You can zoom in, share them, and ‘like’ them. You can also create collections of your own, using your favourite images and details. Not only that, but the Rijksmuseum is also inviting you to use these images to create beautiful products. At this resolution, a single detail is still sharp enough to decorate a car.

 

This page shows some examples of other people’s creations and offers links to websites that supply various forms of printing on demand. Using them you could order wallpaper , decorate a scooter, have a vinyl foil for your phone, all of them featuring works of art from the Rijksmuseum

UBUWEB

UBUWEB started out in 1996 as a website devoted to concrete poetry, but it has grown to incorporate the functions of a virtual publishing house, record company and, film distributor. Poet, university professor and amateur archivist, Kenneth Goldsmith is the founder and main editor of Ubuweb. An underground project that has no institutional backing or budget of any kind, Ubuweb is an influential repository of avant garde material

Here you can find conceptual writing, dance, electronic music resources, ethnopoetics, film and video art, visual poetry and many special features. Examples include all ten albums from Obscure Records , Brian Eno’s record label from 1975 to 1978 and Six Films by and about Pina Bausch(1975 - 2006)  in UbuWeb's new Dance section (Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim anyone?) There we can review works from the career of Pina Bausch (1940-2009) including the beautiful  Orpheus und Eurydike (1975) and a documentary by Anne Linsel, Pina Bausch (2006). Other delights include: Maya Deren's complete oeuvre, a montage of Banksy doctoring Paris Hilton CDs for last year's guerrilla art stunt, interviews with Allen Ginsberg, poetry readings by Bukowski and a selection of rare art films and performance videos by artists from Carolee Schneeman and Tracey Emin to Samuel Beckett and ChrisBurden, video of BillieWhitelaw doing Beckett and  excerpts from Peter Greenaway's series of documentaries on modern UScomposers

A full list of resources is here

http://www.ubu.com/resources/index.html

Twitter is @ubuweb

A Materials Library for the 21st Century

This video, by The Economist, features Andrew Dent, vice-president of Material ConneXion,sharing his thoughts on the evolution of material science.
Material ConneXion's online archive and material libraries, based in seven cities world-wide, feature over 6,500 of the world’s most cutting-edge materials all of them commercially available for use.
Andrew Dent believes Material ConneXion will help bridge the gap between science and design as we move from the “synthetic century” into a “biological century”, where intelligent, nature-inspired materials consume less resources and less energy.
 An international panel of experts review 50 to 60 new materials for the library every month, adding  only the best.
The archive is organized in eight categories (see below)  comprising the largest selection of sustainable materials and the only Cradle to Cradle materials library in the world:
the 8 categories: Polymers, Ceramics, Glass, Metals, Cement-based materials, Natural Materials, Carbon-based materials, Processes
An online Materials Database is available at a price to Universities (not available at Cardiff Met).

NewYork, Bangkok, Beijing, Cologne, Daegu, Istanbul, Milan, Seoul, Shanghai all have physical Material Connexions libraries

Feature articles from Matter magazine (published quarterly by Material Connexions) are available to read online . Each edition of the  journal  follows a specific  theme  like the special issues on  'Wellness' and 'Technology' and  all contain a wealth of information and images relating to innovative materials and their uses.

dishonesty and other issues in The CRITICAL COMMONS

 SCALAR  is a web based authoring and publishing tool that 'makes it easy for authors to write significant sized born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required'.

Part of the SCALAR toolset is access to Critical Commons a repository of copyright cleared audio visual materials.

Do you want to illustrate Deleuze with a clip from Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) or read the lecture, view the clips pertaining to Synthetic Sexuality: The Allure of Humanity and the Subversion of Perfection' ? Or  (see the image above ) view a scene from a Simpsons episode about issues of stealing to make a point in your study of economics ? They are all available from The Critical Commons.

The largest subset within the Critical Commons media database is produced by a senior lecturer in Economics at Penn State University and author of the book Economics in the Movies, Dirk Mateer and comprises a huge collection of clips from popular culture that illustrate principles of economics, ranging from game theory to opportunity cost. Dirk's database is called the  "Econ Media Library" . Go here to understand the concept of price elasticity of demand and leveraging elastic demand by laughing as Butters from South Park decides to sell hugs for $2 when he discovers that not everyone can afford kisses at the kissing booth for $5. 

Critical Commons is  well worth a visit whatever your subject area.

travel to World Wonders from home

Would you like to take a journey on the Rhaetian Railway through the Swiss Alps? Or perhaps you’d prefer to explore the mosaics of Pompeii in Italy. Or gaze upon the nine-story Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain. Or track down the Aboriginal rock art at Kakadu National Park in Australia.

Google Street View has left the road and photographed some of the world’s most impressive monuments and parks. Launched at the end of May in Madrid, the World Wonders Project is the latest creation from the Paris-based Google Cultural Institute, a wing of the company that aims to spread culture and history to users around the globe.
To scan inside the Nijo Castle in Kyoto and traverse the grounds of Stonehenge, Google had to ditch its typical car-mounted scanners. Instead it created image-capture equipment suitable for adapted tricycles and vertical trolleys that can be pushed around to capture indoor sites. These trikes globe-trotted for a whole year, sailing down the Amazon River and sitting atop the Glacier Express train in Switzerland.

To document 132 heritage sites worldwide, the Google team has partnered with content providers such as UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, and Getty Images The site is  geared towards educational uses , as both students and teachers can download free lesson plans and presentations.

Google World Wonders Project is here


A related video explains the background

Another Google Cultural Institute project launched early last year was The Art Project a collaboration with 17 museums and covering  about 1,000 works of art. In April 2012 , the updated version contained 32,000 artworks from 155 museums. The institute has also digitized Nelson Mandela’s archives, the Dead Sea scrolls, and documents and photos from the Yad Vashem Centre for Holocaust research.