Welcome Home Dr. Bob-Here's Something to Check Out

One of our loyal readers has just returned home from another stint in the hospital so here's an old idea made new again. It's the Google Art Project. You might remember that I reviewed this Google project when it first launched last year with about 16 museums making parts of their collection available for a special photographic process that allowed a fantastic amount of zoom. I got yelled at by museum guards as a little kid because I always wanted to get close to the paintings to see how they were done. With the Google Art Project I can now      get as close as I want.

Google has changed the website considerably and on a quick early visit I was convinced that it wasn't a change for the better as pictures loaded very slowly. The upside of the new site was the inclusion of more museums-a lot more. There are now 134 museums represented. Some places aren't even traditional museums like the cave that houses a collection of Australian Aboriginal Rock Art. I've revisited the site often in the last few days, and once you learn to navigate the site things speed up considerably.

When you arrive at the Art Project, you get a random blow up of an art object and the option to open "Collections," "Artists," "Artwork," and "User Galleries." Click on one and it opens an alphabetical listing-the artist listing is bizarrely alphabetical by artist's first name. I just clicked on Edvard Munch and a series of thumbnails of the 58 works included in the Project popped up. I clicked on one of the thumbnails and waited and waited. Why it was several seconds-unheard of since the days of 1200 baud modems, but what the Google Art Project does is open the full version of the picture you clicked on as well as film strip that pops up along the bottom of the frame. Click on a thumbnail in the filmstrip and the new picture opens instantly. If you start with a museum collection, think of that first delay as standing in line to get in.

What kind of museums are included? Many of the big ones have made scores or hundreds of works available. Our Museum of Fine Arts have over 200 objects in the Project including this fellow from the Asian Art Collection:

 This is a close-up-I just love his expression. The new Project includes many more objects and photographs to supplement all the paintings. Besides the big museums, however, are those special little museums we all like to stumble upon when we travel. For instance, there is a museum of modern art from the Olympics, an art nouveau museum, and a whole bunch of museums I have no idea about because their names are in German! There are real finds out there like the 415 objects from the Art Gallery of New South Wales or the photographs of Julia Cameron. Best of all you can put together your own gallery, comment on the individual works in your gallery and then make it available for public viewing. Some day I may make the ultra special South Easton Museum of Art with its multiple galleries public.

Tomorrow an appreciation of astronomy apps for the iPad.