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Guide to Using Artstor at Brandeis

This guide was originally created in September 2006 by Deborah Vincelli at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who graciously offered to share it with Brandeis University. It has been altered by Darwin Scott & Lisa Zeidenberg to fit Brandeis community needs

Displaying, Sorting, and Clustering Results

After running a search, your results will be displayed in a Thumbnail mode, displaying a thumbnail with title, creator and date information in the caption. You can also display results in larger thumbnail mode, which displays additional information with larger thumbnail images, by clicking on the second icon located under the Advanced Search link in the center of the page.  

Use the navigation arrows on the right to scroll through the images displayed in your search.

You can SORT your results, in either Thumbnail or List Mode, by Creator, Title, Date or Recently Added. Simply choose one of these options from the Sort menu on the top left of your results screen. The date refers to the creation date of the object, and the sort order is date ascending.

Clustering: Artstor clusters duplicate images. The image that is the first within the cluster, and hence connoted as the authoritative copy, is either a Museum contribution, or an image that is determined to be empirically better than other copies of that image residing within Artstor. To view all copies of an image, click on the icon (mousing over this icon, you will see the words: "View related media") below the image in your results list.

More on viewing images in Artstor (from the Artstor Support site)

Detail Page

Double clicking on a thumbnail will open the Detail page. This view provides you with tools with which you can zoom in on details and pan to different sections of the image. It also has tools for printing and saving images. You can launch the Fullscreen viewer from this page, which allows you to proceed sequentially through a presentation and compare up to 10 selected images.

The following page, from Artstor Support, provides detailed explanations for using the various icons featured on the Detail page:

Artstor Support: Object detail page

Viewing Object Data

You can view full information about an object by double-clicking a thumbnail image or the caption text underneath it. This opens the Detail page, with the object data (e.g., creator, title, repository, etc).

You will see a number of options to the right of the image, which allow you to add the image or a details view of it to a new or existing group, download the image or detail of it, cite the item, preview a printed page, and copy the image URL into another document. You can copy and paste this URL directly into a browser, or send it as an email to a colleague. When the person receiving that email clicks on the link for that URL, they will be prompted to log in, and then will be taken directly to the image

More on item data in Artstor (from the Artstor Support site)