Mattress Factory, a museum in Pittsburgh

I ran across a really great museum on the internet recently: The Mattress Factory, which describes itself:

"The Mattress Factory is a museum of contemporary art that presents art you can get into — room-sized environments, created by in-residence artists. Located in the historic Mexican War Streets of Pittsburgh’s North Side since 1977, the Mattress Factory is one of few museums of its kind anywhere."

This piece by Sarah Oppenheimer is called 610-3356 and is an actual hole in the floor of one of the galleries.  It connects to a window in a gallery below, providing a view out that window.

The Mattress Factory also has a permanent exhibition of its own visitors called MF iConfess, a "confessional-like" structure in the museum lobby where visitors answer the question "What does the Mattress Factory mean to you?" (and other things!). 

One of the current exhibitions is called Sites of Passage which documents the performance artist Tavia La Follette's participation in an Artists Residency program in Egypt in the summer 2010.  

During her residency, she started a project called Firefly Tunnels, which she describes as "metaphorical passageways for the exchange of ideas through the language of Performance Art."   The multimedia collaboration project involves artists from Egypt and the United States and includes some fascinating images.

Library Science: The Art Exhibit!

Artspace, an independent visual arts venue in New Haven, Connecticut, has announced a new exhibition called Library Science, which will be on view through January 28, 2012.  The exhibition features the works of 17 international artists, exploring their intellectual and physical relationships to the library.

Chris Coffin: Hurricanes 551.55 D (2003)

One of the artists, Reynard Loki, visually presents his own classification system of his personal library, based on the first and last lines of his books.  Madeleine Djerejian's photographic portraits were taken at "the Grolier Club in New York, the nation’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and graphic arts enthusiasts."

Philippe Gronon: Catalog de manuscrits, Bibliothèque Vaticane, Rome (one of 5 panels), 1995

Creusot-Monceau Ecomuseum

Model of a steam engine by William Murdock, 1784

I ran across a really interesting museum collection focusing on industrial machinery in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in France.


They have a gigantic model built over twenty years starting in the 1890s that includes 38 automatons and replicates industrial activities throughout the whole plant in Franche-Comte.

Francois Bonhomme (1864): Forge in Creusot

You can  read a bit about the idea behind this community museum in this article in MuseumCommunities.

Two Archives Announce Online Collections

The Robert L. Van Nice Collection

Photo from a study of light in Hagia Sophia

done by Thomas Whittemore’s team in 1948

"A processing blog for the Robert L. Van Nice Records and Fieldwork Papers (1937-1985) at the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archive of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C."

Online Medici Archive Project

"The Medici Archive Project is a non-profit international Foundation based in the Archivio di Stato in Florence, Italy with offices in the United States. This ambitious online archive project is dedicated to revealing the astonishing story of the most influential family dynasty in Western civilization: the Medici."

10 Free Online Image Editing Tools

An interesting blog post from Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers series appeared this month about open source image editing tools.  Since PhotoShop is so expensive and out of reach for many students (and faculty!), these tools might be useful for presenting and research papers.

Web Accessibility Initiative

The Web Accessibility Initiative is an excellent project that seeks to provide "Strategies, guidelines, resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities."  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the project's parent organization.

Mapped historical photos, film, and audio | SepiaTown

Mapped historical photos, film, and audio | SepiaTown

Open Source Software: CollectiveAccess

Presentation, Part 1: Description and Context



Presentation, Part 2: Downloading and Conclusions



CollectiveAccess

Unusual library!

Reanimation Library

"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent Presence Library open to the public. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of routine circulation and been acquired for their visual content. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties."

from the 1974 book Soft Sculpture and Other Soft Art Forms

from the 1927 Sixth Annual of Advertising Art

The library's website was created only with Open Source software (although they do admit to using PhotoShop as well).  The site is full of fascinating and somewhat crazy images.  The library uses social media, so you can friend them on Facebook.



Definitely worth a virtual visit!

My Blackberry Is Not Working! - The One Ronnie, Preview - BBC One

Teach Parents Tech

Here is a fun website (from Google!  I know, not my favorite big brother...) called Teach Parents Tech which is a lighthearted and mildly sarcastic way to give low-level tech support to the computer-challenged in your life! 

http://www.teachparentstech.org/

You fill out a short note to the challenged person, choose an instructional video, and e-mail it off!

I learned about this site from a ProfHacker blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education website called Technology 101: The Basics No One Ever Tells You.  Enjoy!

Merger of EBSCO Publishing and H. W. Wilson Company

The announcement this week of the merger between publishers EBSCO Publishing and H. W. Wilson Company has the library world all a twitter (in the old-school twitter sense).  Some sources describe it as EBSCO acquiring Wilson.

Here is the Library Journal's take on it:

Wilson operates a similar business to EBSCO offering abstract/index records and fulltext databases via its proprietary platform, Wilson Web, but it is a much smaller company with about 200 employees and sales that are less than 10 percent of EBSCO's.

Databases from Wilson will be integrated with EBSCOhost over the coming months, and, eventually, the WilsonWeb platform will be eliminated, the companies said in a press release. EBSCO will maintain WilsonWeb until all Wilson databases are available on EBSCOhost and customers have been transitioned to EBSCOhost.

(read the rest of the article here).

Steve Lawson, Humanities Liaison Librarian for Tutt Library at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, has a slightly more sarcastic take on the "merger" in his blog, See Also...

Personally, I don't get the depth of the issue, but it seems to be BIG in the library world!

The Virtual Typewriter Museum!

There is actually a Virtual Typewriter Museum for manual typewriters from the late 1800s to early 1900s!  I stumbled across it while searching for the manufacturer of the antique typewriter (probably from the 1960s or 70s) here in my office at work.  It is an "Adler"--a company I had never heard of from "West Germany."

Typewriters found in old slide collections in Art Departments Everywhere had really tiny type ("pika 7" or something like that).  They were specifically made for typing on tiny labels for filing things (like 35mm slides that professors used in classes).

The on-line exhibition format for the Virtual Typewriter Museum is pretty neat, too (not as cool as the Computer History Museum, but...).  I like the way you can type on faux typewriter keys in the "brands" area.

History of Computers

The Computer History Museum website is a must-visit!  In addition to really great information, the virtual exhibition on the home page is fantastic.

When you click on the exhibition title "R | Evolution, View online," you can explore the images of historic computers.


A series of dots (which you also see on the home page image illustrated here) moves you through the exhibit; each dot takes you to a new topic and a new series of images on that topic.


For example, on Aleem Bawany's blog on the History of Computers he discusses the use of a modified version of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in the US Census.  The R | Evolution exhibition shows a picture of that early census punch-card computer.

There is a fabulous video about the Antikythera Mechanism on the timeline, too.  And don't miss the Drumitar in the section about computers and music!