ARTstor for Students
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Get to ARTstor
If you are off campus, you will be prompted to enter your Library Card Number. This is simply your PA ID number, which is located on your ID card.
About ARTstor
ARTstor includes approximately 600,000 images covering architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, decorative arts and design, as well as archeological and anthropological objects, and visual and material culture more generally. ARTstor's software tools support a wide range of pedagogical and research uses including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline.
What Can I Do With ARTstor?
Register For an Account
First and foremost, to get the most out of ARTstor, they (and we) highly recommend registering for an account. This will give you the most functionality ARTstor has to offer. To do so visit the main page of ARTstorclick "go" to enter the ARTstor digital library, and then look to the right of the main content area for the registration link.
Follow the registration instructions and then you're in!
Find an Image
You may either search for images using the basic or advanced search or browse for images. ==== Using the Search ====To search using the basic search, simply type your keyword or phrase (don't forget to use quotation marks to search for whole titles, names or phrases!) into the search box under "Basic Search" in the main content area of ARTstor's main page.
The advanced search allows users to combine many search terms, search by specific date or date range, specific image collection, type of object, and geographical location. The link to the advanced search is in the gray menu bar at the top of the content area.
For more tips and help with using the ARTstor search function see the ARTstor help page on searching.
NAVIGATION TIP! - ARTstor opens up into its own window without the normal browser's navigation bar.
If you want to go to the main page or to a previous page, look for the 'Home' and 'Back' links in the upper left in the
dark gray menu bar at the top of the page.
Browsing For An Image
There are three different categories within which an ARTstor user can browse for images. You may browse by collection, by classification, and by geography.
ARTstor categorizes it's images by collection, because many, if not all, of it's images come from large image collections from other institutions. So, when a user is browsing by collection, they are looking at images grouped together by what organization they came to ARTstor from.
This is handy if you happen to know an image or a painting that you are looking for is at a specific museum or collection you know of.
In this case, simply locate the collection that you want, click on it, and you will be taken to a page that explains the collection, and gives you an expandable and collapsible menu with subcategories indicating how many images are within that subcategory. When you click on that subcategory, you will be taken to a page displaying all of that category's images as thumbnail images, 15 to a page.
Use the small dark gray navigation box in the upper left hand corner to see how many images are in your search results, how many pages of thumbnails you have, page through the thumbnails, go to the beginning or end of the group, and to sort the images by title, creator, or date.
You may also browse by Classification (ARTstor classifies their images by type of art the image represents such as Painting, Architecture, or Sculpture just to name a few) and Geography (by country with subcategories of classification by art type). The browsing mechanism is the same as described for browsing by collection. Simply select the category you want, click on the expanding and contracting menus for subcategories and then on the subcategory for thumbnails.
NAVIGATION TIP! ARTstor allows users to display images in thumbnail format or as a list (when in the list, the images are larger).
Any time you there is a link to somewhere that will display images, you can right click on that link and a menu
will pop up. On this menu (amongst other things) is the option to display images as
a list, or if you are already viewing images in a list, it will give the option to display images as thumbnails.
This can be done with the links on the top level browsing pages,
all the way down to the thumbnail display pages. Just hover over the links or images and right click for the menu.
What To Do Once You Find an Image (or Images) You Like
Once you find an image or images you like or would like to use, there are several ways in which to proceed.
Viewing Images Using the Online Image Viewer
ARTstor actually provides two types of Image Viewers, one is called their 'online' Image Viewer which pops open when a user is logged in and browsing image thumbnails and would like to see a larger version of the image. The other called the 'Offline Image Viewer' (or the OIV) is a program the user must download onto their desktop and once installed, works independently from the ARTstor site. For more information on the OIV, see ARTstor for Faculty/Instructors.
In the meantime! If you are planning on viewing images whilst logged into ARTstor on a computer with internet connectivity, and are only using ARTstor images, the Online Image Viewer should suit your needs.
To open an image in the Online Image Viewer, double click on the actual image and it will open up into a new smaller window. This window will show the larger version of the image along with functionality buttons in the light gray bar below the image area.
These buttons allow you to zoom into the image, pan across the image (assuming the image is larger than the display area - which can happen once you zoom in closely), download the image to your desktop for use in other programs or projects, and to print the image. You can also click on the "i" button below the gray tool bar to get detailed information about the image, and the button beside the "i" button with the diagonal arrow to expand the Viewer into a full screen mode.
For information on which of the buttons does which function, hover your mouse over the button and a label will come up letting you know which is which.
NAVIGATION TIP! - While still on the thumbnail page, you can access the information about the image by clicking on any
of the text below it. When you click on the text, a new smaller window opens with the image
thumbnail and more detailed information about the image. You can click the taps on the top of the window
area to see the image's file properties, giving you information like, the size of the image (the online digital
version, not the original artwork, and the image's URL, which you can use to link to the image in ARTstor
from another program or document (just make sure that person has access to ARTstor if they aren't on the PA campus).
Saving Images to a Group For Later Use
Another feature that ARTstor provides is the ability to save groups of images together that you can save and access later.
Before saving images to a group, you must first select the images that you want to save. To select images you want to save, click once on the thumbnail of the image. This will highlight the image (with a brighter border around the thumbnail) and it will stay selected until you 'un' select it. Images stay selected during the time you are logged onto ARTstor, no matter what you are doing within the ARTstor site.
So, for example, if you did a search on a specific artist, selected a bunch of their paintings on one of the thumbnail pages and decided to look through the other thumbnails or even do another search and look at something else, those images *stay* selected.
If you for some reason decide that you'd like to 'un' select them, you can go to the "View" menu, and click on the "deselect images" option. This will clear your slate and let you begin the selecting process over again.
Once you have selected the images you would like to save in a group go to the menu option "Image Groups" and select "Save selected images to a new group". A pop-up will come up prompting you to either name a new group, which you can type in, or you can select an existing group from the drop down menu.
If you already have a group of images and would like to add additional images, select the additional images, go to the "Image Groups" menu item at the top of the page and select the "Append selected images to an existing group" function from the menu.
Saving Images as Citations
If you plan to use an image in your work, you will have to create a citation to give credit to the person to created it and where you found it.
ARTstor provides a function that helps you cite the images you find on their site. Any images that have been selected (those that are saved to a group or just selected on their own) will be added to the citation list when you select "Save Selected Images as Citations" under the "Image Groups" menu at the top of the page.
When you select this, a pop up will appear and you will see all of the images you have requested be saved as a citation in a list format with their citation information. Above this list is the option to email the citations and to export them to third party citation management software.
NAVIGATION TIP! - All of the functions mentioned above(saving an image to a group, adding an image to an existing group,
and saving an image as a citation) can by accessed by right clicking on the thumbnail.
When you right click on the desired thumbnail, a menu appears and all of these options are available to select.
Adding Personal Notes to Images
You can also add your own notes to each image that will remain private to you and only be available when you are logged into your account.
To add notes to an image, click on the text below the thumbnail and a pop up with the image information will appear. The last tab on the top right is labeled "Personal Notes". When you click on that tab, a white space will appear which allows you to write your own notes about the image for future reference.
Saving Images to Your Desktop
While viewing ARTstor images using the Online Image Viewer or the Offline Image Viewer (as provided by ARTstor) you will be able to zoom in and out (depending on the original quality of the image) to a great degree. Most of the images on ARTstor are very high resolution and can be magnified many times over to view close detail of the image (you can see the brush strokes!). However, when downloading the image from ARTstor to your desktop, the image will be smaller and saved as a low resolution JPEG file, at approximately 400 or 1024 pixels on the long side.
If you are would like to save a close up section of the image, zoom in to the area you are interested in saving with the online image viewer and make sure the image area you want saved is centered within the window of the online image viewer. When you do this and then click the 'save' button, the image that saves to your desktop will be the zoomed in portion of the image you had viewed using the image viewer.
Keep in mind that this image will also be in the low resolution JPEG format.
Ways in Which Your Instructor May Ask You to Use ARTstor
There may be times when your instructor has saved a group of images or has made some notes on an image for a class or presentation that they would like you and your class to access. You can access these things in the following ways.
Access a Shared Folder and Instructor's Notes on an Image
To access a shared folder, log into ARTstor, and go to the "Tools" menu in the upper right hand corner, and select the first option "Access Shared Folder".
A pop up window will appear and prompt you for your name and a password. The password is decided by your instructor and should be provided to you before you log in.
The shared folder will then load along with any notes the Instructor has made on the images.
Offline Image Viewer
The Offline Image Viewer is a stand alone image viewing application that can be downloaded onto any computer. It functions much like PowerPoint software but focuses on the viewing of high resolution images. You can add notes and draw on the actual image, as well as import your own images from places other than ARTstor. For more information on the Offline Image Viewer see ARTstor for Faculty/Instructors.
