UWIC Library subscribes to a huge image database called Bridgeman Education. UWIC staff and students can access the images via the Learning Portal's Electronic Library.

There is now an iphone app allowing you to search the database, view images and their metadata, and to create and view slide shows on your phone, Simply log in as usual with your UWIC username and password. The app requires iOS or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

For those who like to read-Granta magazine online

 Since 1979 Granta has published many of the world’s finest writers tackling some of the world’s most important subjects, from intimate human experiences to the large public and political events that have shaped our lives. Its contributors have included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Richard Ford, Martha Gellhorn, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Salman Rushdie, George Steiner, Graham Swift, Paul Theroux, Edmund White, Jeanette Winterson and Tobias Wolff.

Every issue since 1979 is still in print and can be bought from the online shop.
Granta.com publishes a wealth of material that you won’t find in the print magazine – including video interviews, brand-new short stories and essays, audio recordings from our events and photography slideshows. You can sign up to their monthly newsletter – or follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

new resource for African art and its influence on Modern Art

The James J. Ross Archive of African Images, 1590-1920 (RAAI), has been launched at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. This unique archive, accessible at  http://raai.library.yale.edu/, contains approximately 5,000 illustrations of African art published before 1921.  RAAI is a work in progress, aspiring to include every African object that has appeared in a book, periodical, catalogue, newspaper, or other source published in or before 1920. The majority of entries date between 1800 and 1920, a period of heightened international presence in Africa. As trade increased between Africa and the West in the early 19th century, voyagers from the West began intensively recording and collecting the material culture of the African coastline. After 1920, an enormous profusion of collecting, exhibiting, and publishing created a flood of images and a whole new regard for African art. 

RAAI is a collection of rich historical data and extensively catalogued and annotated images. Images include prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs of objects from a range of contexts: in situ in the original performance context, in exhibitions, in casual snapshots, and in studio photography. Its historical sources afford exceptional insight into early European and American views-both literal and figurative-of Africa's art.

The last roll of Kodachrome

Kodachrome II had incredible color, National Geographic insisted its photographers all used it. McCurry is one of the all-time great photojournalists. He shot the last roll of Kodachrome ever processed (on December 30th 2010). Here are some of the images from that roll which he published on his blog. This is what he wrote on December 30th
Today is the day that Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab on the planet to process Kodachrome,  stops developing the iconic film forever.  When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, they gave me the last roll.   When I finished shooting the final frames, I hand-delivered  it to Parsons.   Here are a few of those last 36 frames

The Do Lectures: Alex Haws 'Invite Stranger to Dinner'

The Do lectures from last year are still being uploaded even as the next Do lectures are being planned for 2011.

Every year, Howies the Welsh clothing manufacturers (not how they would describe themselves) invite a people to West Wales to come and talk about what they Do.
"They can be small Do's or big Do's or just plain amazing extraordinary Do's. But when you listen to their stories, they just light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart.
To go find your cause to fight for, your company to go start, your invention to invent, your book to write, your mountain to climb".

See Alex Haws in a regrettable suit describe the house he designed in Battersea for a gardener. The staircase is exquisitely beautiful , made using a computer programme that allowed him to draw the lines that drove the machine that cut the parts.

Music, fairy stories, folk practices and ghostly tales from Scotland

Bothy ballads, love songs, children's rhymes, laments and songs composed by village poets along with fairy stories, historical legends and tales of ghosts and kelpies. Birth, life and death customs and work practices , if these things interest you then check out

Tobar an Dualchais

More than 15,000 recordings from Scotland's past are available online on the oral archive, Tobar an Dualchais. The recordings, from all parts of the country,  some dating back more than eight decades, are drawn from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, the BBC and the National Trust for Scotland's Canna Collection.

Dulwich Picture Gallery's anniversary celebrations

Dulwich Picture Gallery houses one of the world's most important collections of European old master paintings of the 1600s and 1700s.The collection is also one of the oldest in Great Britain, substantially put together in the years 1790 to 1795. The paintings are housed in the first purpose-built art gallery in England, designed by Sir John Soane in 1811.

 Today the Gallery  announced it was marking its 200th anniversary in 2011 by displaying specially loaned paintings for a month at a time by artists such as Velázquez, El Greco, Rembrandt, Constable and David Hockney. One of the most eye-catching is the self-portrait of Van Gogh –  for July – from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. A 19-year-old Van Gogh walked from central London to Dulwich Art Gallery in 1873 and made a mess of the visitor's book by blotting ink all over it. Unfortunately all that is known of his experience, said Dejardin, is that he "had a nice day