The Information Commons in Library West

New Online Archives:

The archives of Gala, Miner’s and Crystal, three prominent cosmetics companies operating during and after the Second World War, are held at London College of Fashion and have been digitised and made freely accessible through VADS (Visual Arts Data Service):  http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/LCFGALA

VADS is an amazing online resource that has made available over 100,000 visual arts images for educational use:  http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/index.html in addtion to providing access to other valuable educational resources: http://www.vads.ac.uk/resources/index.html

Their site also offers a great “lightbox” function to help users organize images chosen from the collections.

Model in suit wearing hat and gloves applying Lip Line lipstick.
Straw bowler by Jean Desses. Used in Ford Family April/May 1952.

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White House Continues to go 2.0

On Friday (05/01/09), the White House added three more social networking accounts to it’s bag of web 2.o tools: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

You can also follow the Official White House Photostream on Flickr, where official White House photos “are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs.” 

The White House has also sported an official White House Blog as well as an official YouTube page since January 20, 2009, and as of this blog post, their YouTube channel has over 47,000 subscribers and over 1.1 million channel views.

Thanks to Dr. Dilger for the White House Flickr reminder.

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TinEye – a “reverse search engine”

Got a picture?  Want to see where else it’s used on the web?  Maybe you want to find similar images?  Maybe you’re just trying to identify it?   Well, TinEye can help you with that.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine.  You search for images using images, not words to find out where the image came from, how it’s being used, if modified versions exist, or to find higher resolution copies. 

TinEye searches billions of sites in seconds and is really easy to use.  You can upload an image or insert a URL that contains the image you are using to search.  It’s the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.  

For those of you who need to know ALL the details first, you can watch a short, three minute video tutorial on their FAQ page.

For the rest of you who just want to start playing right away, go for it!  :D

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Cool New Resource: The World Digital Library

The World Digital Library, launched by the United Nation’s cultural agency, offers FREE access to rare manuscripts, books, films and maps from around the world, AND in your choice of seven different languages!

There are some great film and audio recordings in this collection. You can stream original footage shot by the famous Lumière brothers  as well as view footage of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.

Some of the contributions are old (as in 8,000 BC old!) and among the many artifacts are a 1,000-year-old Japanese novel and the earliest known map to mention America by name.

If you see something you like and want to bookmark it or share with your friends, they offer a HUGE list of web 2.0/social networking options so you can easily post the item to your Facebook, blog,  FriendFeed, etc.:
 

They just launched in April, but expect to see this collection grow quickly. Now that they’re live, interest will grow and more institutions will certainly want to jump on board.

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