Shanghai International Convention Center; overview at sunset; 1999 | Shanghai, China | Image and original data provided by ART on FILE, artonfile.com

We heard you loud and clear and we are extending the deadline to this year’s ARTstor Travel Awards competition until Tuesday, May 28 (the day after Memorial Day Weekend)!

That means you still have two weeks to create an ARTstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know.

Five applicants will win $1,500 each to help support educational and scholarly travel activities (such as flying to a conference). College and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field associated with institutions that subscribe to the ARTstor Digital Library are eligible to apply.

Learn more at artstor.org/travelawards.

To view the complete image groups for the Travel Awards-winning essays, visit the ARTstor Digital Library’s Featured Groups and click on Travel Awards.

Left: Jeanne Lanvin | Ensemble, Evening; Summer 1923. Right: Jeanne Lanvin | Suit, Evening (Tuxedo); 1927. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The recent movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby has turned the spotlight on the fashion and styles of the Roaring Twenties. So what made the twenties roar?

The economic boom was decisive. Soldiers came home from World War I to jobs in manufacturing plants ready to turn from war production to consumer goods; with the flourishing economy, many commodities became affordable for the first time. Another key engine for progress was the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It was signed into law in 1920, heralding unprecedented liberation. The twenties were also a pivotal time for mass communication: radio, cinema, and the automobile sped up the distribution of information—and trends.

Byron Company | Auburn Sales Co., Cord Front Drive Car Exhibit, two cars; 1929 | Museum of the City of New York; mcny.org

Inevitably, fashion began to reflect the changes in society. Women moved away from restricting fashions to more comfortable clothes. Flappers, as rebellious young women were known, turned their backs on corsets, dropped their dress waistlines to the hips, and bobbed their hair. Skirts rose to just below the knee, allowing flashes of leg when dancing the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, and the Foxtrot. Popular hat styles included the Newsboy cap and Cloche hat, and high heels came into vogue. Men’s styles, although slower to change, also shifted from highly formal daily attire to more comfortable garments.

The ARTstor Digital Library has many resources for the study of the 1920s. Particularly rich are collections such as the Museum of the City of New York, which features tens of thousands of images documenting New York City’s changing cultural, political, and social landscape from its earliest days to the present; The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes, which documents nearly 6,000 American and European period costumes and accessories; Gazette du Bon Ton (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), images of French fashion plates that offer a unique visual record of fashion and high society in the early 20th century; and Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States (Library of Congress), an overview of American history through images of works within the Library of Congress’ special collections. To find even more images, click on “Advanced Search,” set the date parameters from 1920 to 1929, then click on the classification of your interest.

Drop by our booth and meet Rebecca Shows, Implementation Manager, and Sian Evans, Sr. Library Relations, to learn about Shared Shelf, ARTstor’s media management software.

More details at the SUNY CIT Conference website.

David Heald, photographer | Frank Gehry: Architect | May 18 – September 4, 2001 | Photograph: © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

The ARTstor Digital Library and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have collaborated to share nearly 5,500 installation views spanning from 1990’s to the present from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The images in this release include documentation of seminal exhibitions such as: Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective; The Worlds of Nam June Paik; James Rosenquist: A Retrospective; Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle; and Kandinsky.

This is the second release of a projected total of 7,000 images of art, exhibition installation views, and architecture from the Foundation. Future releases will include more than 1,000 installations views from the museums in Bilbao and Venice, and 200 historical and contemporary photographs documenting the architecture of the Foundation’s three museum buildings.

Since its inception in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has been a preeminent institution for the collection, preservation, and research of modern and contemporary art. The global network that began in the 1970s when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, was joined by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, has expanded since 1997 to include several other museums, most prominently the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation page.

Related collections:

• The Museum of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• New Museum of Contemporary Art
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Contemporary Art (Larry Qualls Archive)
• Barnes Foundation
• Jacqueline Barnitz: Modern Latin American Art (University of Texas at Austin)
• Roy Lichtenstein
• Elizabeth Peyton
• Mark Rothko

Alfred Jacob Miller | Roasting The Hump Rib, 1858-1860 | The Walters Art Museum

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly. Why the hedging? Because the closest to an official citation we could find was this post on the USDA blog from 2012. But we’ll go with it because a) it gives us the excuse to post this mid-19th century watercolor from The Walters Art Museum, b) we like barbecue, and c) it’s close to lunchtime.

View this image in the ARTstor Digital Library to read the metadata, which includes the artist’s mouthwatering description of how the ribs are cooked.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | La Chaine Simpson (bicycle chains), 1896 | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

May is National Bike Month! Did you know that there are more than a billion bicycles worldwide? Perhaps more surprisingly, the basic configuration of a bicycle hasn’t changed much from the chain-driven model developed around 1885.

Amed T. Thibault | Bicycle, Livery, Carriage, and Paint Shop Trade Sign, 1895-1905 | American Folk Art Museum; folkartmuseum.org

The first pedal-propelled bicycle was reputedly invented by Kirkpatrick MacMillan in Scotland in 1839. While not everyone agrees on his breakthrough, it is widely accepted that MacMillan was the first person to be charged with a cycling traffic offense in 1842 after he was fined five shillings for knocking over a little girl.

In the early 1860s, bicycle design was improved in France by a crank drive with pedals and a larger front wheel that allowed the rider to travel farther with every rotation of the pedals. The model soon developed into the “penny-farthing,” which boasted wheels with solid rubber tires mounted on a tubular steel frame. While certainly formidable-looking, the high placement of the seat and the poor weight distribution made it difficult to ride.

British businessmen eventually reduced the size of the front wheel and set the seat further back for the “Coventry Model.” Having the front wheel to both pedal and steer was still a problem, ultimately solved by a chain drive connecting the frame-mounted cranks to the rear wheel. These models, known as safety bicycles, were easier to maneuver, but their heavy tires made for a bumpy ride until the first practical pneumatic tire was introduced in 1888. This was quickly followed by the rear freewheel, which enabled the rider to coast, and coaster (or foot) brakes. Bicycles were finally pretty much like the ones you see on the streets today.

The images in this post include Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster, 1896, from Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives; Amed T. Thibault bicycle shop Sign, 1895-1905, from American Folk Art Museum; Thomas Worth’s cartoon on “The Velocipede Mania,” 1869, from Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Collection; Byron Company’s photo of bicycle daredevils, 1901, from the Museum of the City of New York; Diavolo “looping the loop on a bicycle,” 1902-1904, from the The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: Circus Collection; a view of a rental bike rack outside Francis Soler’s Ministere de la Culture et de la Comunication in Paris from the ART on FILE Collection; and via Shared Shelf Commons, two anonymous hip students in the 1970s from Colby College Special Collections and Joe Conzo’s photograph of The Cold Crush Brothers outside United Bronx Parents, ca. 1980-1981 from Cornell University’s Joe Conzo, Jr Archive.

Of course, bicycles continued—and continue—to evolve, with hand brakes, multiple gears, front (and even rear) suspension, etc. We don’t claim to have the latest models, but you can see ARTstor staff’s bicycles on Facebook.

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Collected: 8/1975, Madagascar, Africa | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Spring time is here and butterflies are already making their annual appearance, according to butterfliesandmoths.org. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a slide show of selections from a wide variety of eras, regions, and fields of study, from science to art to costume design.

Search the ARTstor Digital Library for butterfl* to find more than 1,000 images with the keywords “butterfly” or “butterflies.”

Click on any image to view the slide show and to read the full captions.

Our slide show includes an image of a very serious-looking butterfly collector from George Eastman House; several examples from the nearly 70 specimens of butterflies in Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History; an 18^th-century painting of a mischievous cat chasing a butterfly from Réunion des Musées Nationaux; a 1910 lithograph of the Ty-Bell Sisters, Aerial Butterflies from The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Circus Collection; a colorful illumination from the Book of Hours of Queen Isabella I, ca. 1495-1500, from The Cleveland Museum of Art Collection; and an evening dress and a bonnet from more than two dozen butterfly-themed dresses and accessories in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brooklyn Museum Costumes.

After you perform a search, you will see an option to Save this search in the upper right of the thumbnail page of search results. Click on it, then click Save and enter a name for your saved search. You can save up to 30 searches.

To run a saved search record, click My saved searches near the search box on the front page of the Digital Library or on a search results page.

Done with a particular saved search? To delete it, click on My saved searches, then click on the X next to the search you want to delete. You’ll see a prompt asking if you want to delete it; click Yes and you’re finished.

Antoni Gaudí | La Pedrera (Mila House) | 1906-1910 | Image and original data provided by Shmuel Magal, Sites and Photos; sites-and-photos.com

The ARTstor Travel Awards are back and they are now open to undergraduate students! This year the theme is cities: their histories and development, their depictions in art and documentation, their architecture, their ruins, their governments, their peoples, their myths.

Create an ARTstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know. Five winners— college and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field—will receive $1,500 each to help support travel-related educational and scholarly activities. Winning essays and other selected submissions will be published on the ARTstor Blog, ARTstor website, and via our social media channels. Deadline extended to Tuesday, May 28.

Rules:

1. Applicants must create one or more image groups with a maximum of 100 images total exclusively from the ARTstor Digital Library and save their image group(s) in their registered user account.
2. Applicants must submit a single essay in English no longer than 500 words explaining why this image group(s) about a city or cities is exceptionally useful for teaching, research, or scholarship in his/her area of specialization in the arts, architecture, humanities, or sciences. Each applicant may submit only one essay.
3. All college and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians who are at least 18 years of age and associated with institutions that subscribe to the ARTstor Digital Library are eligible to apply. To see if your institution subscribes to ARTstor, visit our Current subscribers’ page.
4. The names, essays, and image groups of all submitters may be published on the ARTstor public website, and may be shared by ARTstor in other venues, such as in the ARTstor blog and the ARTstor newsletter.
5. Winners are solely responsible for any taxes or other costs associated with these awards and will receive a 1099 tax form at the end of the year.
6. Deadline for entries: 11:59 PM EDT May 28, 2013; Winners announced: June 10, 2013; Awards will be made by: July 1, 2013

Application instructions:

1. Register for a free ARTstor account and fill out all the information fields. If you already have an account, log in, then click on “Edit my profile” on the upper right corner and make sure all the information is complete and current. Entries with missing or outdated fields may be disqualified.
2. Create the image group (or groups) that you wish to submit. Note that your image group cannot include Personal Collection or Institutional images.
3. On the ARTstor Digital Library menu bar, go to Find, then choose Unlock password-protected folder. Enter the password travelawards. The Travel Awards Submissions folder will now be accessible under Unlocked Folders; in it you will find a folder with your initials and surname on it.
4. Copy your image group(s) into the folder with your name.
5. Enter your name, email address, and organization affiliation along with your essay as an image group description (you can copy and paste from another document), then save it.
6. Log off once you have completed the submission process. You’re done!

To view the complete image groups for the Travel Awards-winning essays, visit the ARTstor Digital Library’s Featured Groups and click on Travel Awards.

We have some great ARTstor and Shared Shelf events planned for the ARLIS-NA Conference:

Thursday, April 25, 5 – 7 PM
Join us for a Shared Shelf Happy Hour at El Cholo Café at the Paseo Colorado Mall, around the block from the main entrance to the conference hotel, 260 East Colorado Blvd, second floor.

Saturday, April 27, 12:15 – 1:15 PM
Join ARTstor president James Shulman and ARTstor/Shared Shelf staff for lunch at Ballroom A, where we will provide updates on various ARTstor services including the Digital Library, Shared Shelf, and free services such as Images for Academic Publishing, Shared Shelf Commons, and the Built Works Registry.

Saturday, April 27, 1:30 – 3:00 PM
Ian McDermott, ARTstor Collection Development Associate will present “Not Not a Librarian” at the Alt-ARLIS: How Non-Traditional Paths Can Serve Your Career and the Society panel discussion.

Sunday, April 28, 9:15 – 10:45 AM
Caroline Caviness, Shared Shelf Senior Implementation Manager, is moderating Doing Data Together: Engaging End-Users in Building Richer Resources, More Efficiently.