Titles devoted to Picasso, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Klimt and more are now available for your reading pleasure
From My Modern Met:Perusing through a beautiful, hefty art book is one of life’s simple pleasures, but beautiful, hefty art books can be pretty expensive. Fortunately, the Guggenheim is on a mission to digitize its vast collection of titles. As Beckett Mufson reports for Vice, the museum has made 205 art books available for free download.
The project began in 2012, when 65 titles were released online, and the Guggenheim has slowly been growing its digital archive ever since. Among the latest additions are works devoted to Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Fans of Wassily Kandinsky can browse through a 1946 copy of On the Spiritual in Art, an influential treatise by the pioneering abstract artist.
As KC Ifeanyi notes in Fast Company, most of the available books are rare or out-of-print titles, making the archive a great resource for art lovers—even those who aren’t strapped for cash.....MORE
New Digital Archive Features Over 2 Million Photos from the First 100 Years of Photography....MORE, including four other collections
In the age of the Internet, the digitization of historical materials has proven to play a crucial role in the preservation and proliferation of cultural heritage. In addition to major museums and large-scale libraries, archives around the world have adopted this practice. This phenomenon has been made particularly apparent by Europeana Collections, an online platform that has digitized over 53 million “artworks, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe.” For its most recent project, Europeana Photography, the website has reproduced photographs from the first 100 years of photography and shared them with the public—all for free.
Europeana Photography features over 2.2 million historical photographs with origins that span 50 European institutions sprawled across 34 different countries. As they were taken over the course of 100 years, the photographs that compose the collection present a wide range in style, quality, and subject matter (though, much like contemporary photography, landscapes, portraits, and still-life depictions seem to dominate). In addition to presenting photography's evolving sensibilities, Europeana Photography also showcases the work of prolific photographers, including “important pioneers like Julia Margaret Cameron, Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Daguerre” through curated galleries and museum-inspired online exhibitions....
...You can find the digital archive here.
HT: Mental Floss who write:
"The database is searchable, downloadable, and shareable, and many of the images are in the public domain. So get clicking, because those 19th-century memes aren’t going to make themselves."Finally, from the Library of Congress, something a little different.
From Open Culture:
The Library of Congress Makes 25 Million Records From Its Catalog Free to Download
A quick fyi: According to Fortune, The Library of Congress announced that it “will make 25 million records from its catalog available for the public to download.” They add:
Prior to this, the records—which include books and serials, music and manuscripts, and maps and visual materials spanning from 1968 to 2014—have only been accessible through a paid subscription. These files will be available for free download on [the Library of Congress site] and are also available on data.gov.This move helps free up the library’s digital assets, allowing social scientists, data analysts, developers, statisticians and everyone else to work with the data “to enhance learning and the formation of new knowledge.” The huge data sets will be available here.