What is Luna Insight?
Luna Imaging Inc.'s Insight is a powerful software tool for building, publishing, searching and presenting collections of digital images and other media via the Internet. The Vassar College Insight system currently contains ten different collections, amounting to over 200,000 images, including many areas of art from prehistory to contemporary, architectural photographs, images from Colonial America, historical maps from the Americas and Asia, and select items from the National Palace in Taipei. A Vassar College Visual Resources Collection will soon be available for search and retrieval of images used in the teaching of art history.
Content in Insight may be used to create a presentation that can be viewed via the Internet or saved to individual desktops. Images may be exported individually to be used in familiar presentation tools, or downloaded as entire Powerpoint or Keynote files.
Groups of images can be saved, annotated, and shared with other Insight users, such as a class that requires review images each week. If you are a faculty member with your own collection of digital material and would like to create and manage your own collection, Personal Insight may be the right tool for you. (Please contact ACS for further details).
The images in Insight are licensed to the Vassar community for teaching, scholarship and classroom presentation. Images may not be reprinted or republished without permission from the copyright holders.
Available Collections:
Vassar College Scholars Resource Collection
The Vassar College Scholars Resource Collection is comprised of approximately 65,000 quality images of art, architecture, and cultural heritage from around the world. Scholars Resource is an umbrella organization which distributes and licenses the images for multiple vendors. Vendors include Saskia, Davis Art Images, the Bridgeman Art Library, and Hartill Art Associates. Images range from prehistory to the twentieth century, with particular strengths in Ancient Greek and Roman art and Western European painting. There are also selections of art from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and from Islamic and Oceanic collections. More information about the images and vendors is available from Scholars Resource.The AMICA Library Collection
The AMICA Library, Art Museum Images from Cartography Associates, documents approximately 114,000 different works of art, from prehistoric goddess figures to contemporary installations. More than an image database, the AMICA Library works are fully documented and may include curatorial text, detailed provenance information, multiple views and other related multimedia. Formerly The AMICO Library™, subscribers find this resource valuable because it combines the immediacy and accessibility of the Web with the persistence and academic weight of traditional library reference sources.David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection contains to date over 10,000 maps online and focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America cartographic history materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. The collection categories include old and antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, children and manuscript maps. Genealogy and family history can be studied on the maps. The online collection is an expanding cross section of digital images designed to highlight the depth of the collection.John Carter Brown Library's Archive of Early American Images
The Archive of Early American Images database is intended to assist historians in their quest for contemporary images to illustrate their research findings and to facilitate the study of historical images in their own right and in proper context. It is also intended to be a unique resource for picture researchers, documentary filmmakers, and others looking for material for commercial use. The database, still in the process of compilation, will have ultimately about 5,000 images.The vast majority of these images come from relatively obscure books printed in Europe in the early modern period that have in them material related to the Americas. Many of these pictures have never before been reproduced in any form. Thus, the appearance of these images in this database is the first time they have been exposed to general view outside of the book in which the image was first printed centuries ago. The books themselves are in more than a dozen languages, but predominantly in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, English, German, Italian, and Latin and all printed before ca. 1825.
Japanese Historical Map Collection
The Japanese Historical Map Collection contains about 2,300 early maps of Japan and the World. The collection was acquired by the University of California from the Mitsui family in 1949, and is housed on the Berkeley campus in the East Asian Library. Represented in this online collection are 850 images of maps and books from this Collection. The maps were selected by Yuki Ishimatsu, Head of Japanese Collections at the East Asian Library, and scanned and put online by David Rumsey and Cartography Associates. The project was initiated by Peter Zhou, Director of the East Asian Library. Funding and project management is provided by Cartography Associates and the East Asian Library.The Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photographs Collection
The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, is home to the Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photographs Collection, comprised of approximately 13,000 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of architecture, decorative arts and sculpture. White (1832-1918), the first president of Cornell University, established the collection by donating several thousand images from his personal architectural library. In 1999, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, in collaboration with the Department of Preservation and Conservation and the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, undertook a project to preserve, house, catalogue and digitize the entire collection. Currently, the Insight image database contains 1260 images. More will be added as the project evolvesNational Palace Museum
The curators of the National Palace Museum in Taipei have carefully selected roughly 5,000 images of works from their permanent collection to be included in this new digitized collection from Cartography Associates. The scope of these works spans seven millennia of Chinese history and pre-history. Works include rare books, ceramics, paintings, bronzes, jewelry, studio accessories, costumes, and more.The Farber Gravestone Collection
The Farber Gravestone Collection is an unusual resource containing over 13,500 photographic images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States. The late Daniel Farber of Worcester, Massachusetts, and his wife, Jessie Lie Farber, were responsible for the largest portion of the collection. This online version of the Farber Gravestone Collection is sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society. The Web site and online image database have been created by David Rumsey and Cartography Associates.Ensminger Brothers Collection
This is a collection of Spanish-American War era photographs taken by the Ensminger Brothers, who were commercial photographers in the late 1800's. They had been commissioned to take the photographs by two British women,Sarah Criggal and her sister. They were from the Isle of White, England and were visiting Florida.