Du Bois Institute’s Image of the Black in Western Art added to ARTstor

The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
(Harvard University) and ARTstor are pleased to announce that they have
reached an agreement to collaborate on the distribution through the ARTstor
Digital Library of approximately 30,000 high quality digital images from
the Du Bois Institute’s Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project
and Photo Archive. Spanning nearly 5,000 years and documenting virtually
all artistic media, the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project
and Photo Archive is an unprecedented research initiative devoted to the
systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been
perceived and represented in art.

Jean and Dominique de Ménil started the archive in 1960 in reaction to
segregation in the United States. Today, the Archive contains photographs
of nearly 30,000 works of art, each one of which is extensively documented
by the Archive's staff. For the first thirty years of the project's
existence, it focused on the production of a prize-winning, four-volume
series of generously illustrated books, The Image of the Black in Western
Art. Since moving to Harvard University in 1994, the project has focused
on production of the final volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art
and expanding access to the Archive itself.

This collaboration between ARTstor and the Du Bois Institute will make this
rich body of visual material and related scholarship available
electronically for the first time. The audience for these materials will
include not only art historians but also scholars, teachers, and students
throughout the humanities and social sciences, who will value having the
ability to access, browse, and make rich educational and scholarly uses of
this unique corpus of images. In reaching this agreement, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., and James Shulman, Executive Director of ARTstor, expressed
their enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies to make this
important scholarly resource more broadly available for noncommercial
pedagogical and scholarly purposes. “The Image of the Black Archive has
been known too little for too long,” said Professor Gates, the W. E. B. Du
Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair of the Department of African and
African American Studies, and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
for African and African American Research, Harvard University. “We at the
Du Bois Institute are delighted to work with ARTstor to make this essential
archive more widely available to scholars and students in the arts,
humanities, and social sciences.” James Shulman adds, “The Image of the
Black Archive contains thousands of images that could not be made available
in the splendid published volumes devoted to this important subject. This
research project embodies an unusually thoughtful approach to
interdisciplinary visual research. This collaboration should therefore
produce an exceptionally significant resource for scholars, teachers and
students in a wide range of fields. ARTstor is delighted to be able to
play a part in making it available for scholarly and educational
purposes.”

RSS Feeds from Nature Publishing

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce the launch of its
newest collection of RSS newsfeeds that delivers tables of content for its
journals and other timely information to scientists' desktops. All
Nature-branded journals in the life sciences now have associated RSS
newsfeeds with rich metadata, while other Nature-branded and NPG titles are
slated soon to follow. Those titles currently providing RSS newsfeeds are:

* Nature

o Nature: Table of Contents;
http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue/rss
o Nature: Advance Online Publication;
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/rss.rdf
o Nature: Japanese Highlights; http://www.natureasia.com/japan/rss.rdf

* Nature Research Journals

o Nature Biotechnology; http://www.nature.com/nbt/current_issue/rss
o Nature Cell Biology; http://www.nature.com/ncb/current_issue/rss
o Nature Genetics; http://www.nature.com/ng/current_issue/rss
o Nature Immunology; http://www.nature.com/ni/current_issue/rss
o Nature Medicine; http://www.nature.com/nm/current_issue/rss
o Nature Neuroscience; http://www.nature.com/neuro/current_issue/rss
o Nature Structural & Molecular Biology;
http://www.nature.com/nsmb/current_issue/rss

* Nature Reviews Journals

o Nature Reviews: Cancer; http://www.nature.com/nrc/current_issue/rss
o Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery;
http://www.nature.com/nrd/current_issue/rss
o Nature Reviews: Genetics; http://www.nature.com/nrg/current_issue/rss
o Nature Reviews: Immunology; http://www.nature.com/nri/current_issue/rss
o Nature Reviews: Microbiology;
http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/current_issue/rss
o Nature Reviews: Molecular Cell Biology;
http://www.nature.com/nrm/current_issue/rss
o Nature Reviews: Neuroscience;
http://www.nature.com/nrn/current_issue/rss

* NPG Journals

o British Dental Journal; http://www.nature.com/bdj/rss.rdf

More RSS newsfeeds available from NPG include those for Nature Jobs and for
Nature's recently released news service News@Nature.com and other news
services:

* Nature Jobs

o Naturejobs: Biological Sciences
Jobs;http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/jobs/biologicalsciences.rdf
o Naturejobs: Physical Sciences
Jobs;http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/jobs/physicalsciences.rdf
o Naturejobs: General Jobs;
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/jobs/general.rdf
o Naturejobs: Editorial Content; http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/rss.rdf

* News@Nature and Other NPG News Services

o News@Nature.com; http://www.nature.com/news/rss.rdf
o Nature Materials Update; http://www.nature.com/materials/rss.rdf
o Nature Signaling Update; http://www.signaling-gateway.org/update/rss.rdf

o Nature Web Focus: Access to the literature: the debate continues;
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/rss.rdf

See <http://www.nature.com/rss> for a complete listing of newsfeeds for
current issues, as well as a brief introduction to the advantages of using
RSS. Additionally the listing of newsfeeds is accessible as an OPML file to
facilitate the ready import of NPG newsfeeds into RSS newsreaders. A master
RSS newsfeed of all NPG newsfeeds is also available for alerting subscribers
to new NPG newsfeeds.

These newsfeeds are all based on the RSS 1.0 format which builds on the W3C
Resource Description Framework and allows rich metadata to be included at
both the channel and item level. Metadata terms are taken from the
IDEAlliance-sponsored PRISM (Publisher Requirements for Industry Standard
Metadata, see <http://www.prismstandard.org/>) basic term set, as well as
the simpler and more familiar Dublin Core term set, which itself is
incorporated under the PRISM standard. Because of its descriptive power NPG
hopes to establish the use of PRISM metadata as a best practice for RSS
syndication within the scholarly publishing community. To this end NPG have
defined and published an RSS 1.0 module 'mod_prism' (see
<http://nurture.nature.com/rss/modules/mod_prism.html>) which allows each of
the terms in the basic PRISM vocabulary to be included within an RSS
newsfeed. We have also developed a jobs metadata term set (including such
terms as 'offeredBy', 'city', 'country', 'postedOn, 'expiresOn', etc) and
make use of these terms in the jobs newsfeeds. We would like to work with
other partners to define a new RSS module aimed at providing a fuller
description of jobs information. Linking to the article full text is
effected using industry-standard mechanisms for persistent linking: DOI and
CrossRef.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is the scientific publishing arm of Macmillan
Publishers Ltd, combining the excellence of Nature, Nature Research
Journals, Nature Reviews Journals, NPG Academic Journals and NPG Reference
publications, to provide the world's premier information resource for the
basic biological and physical sciences. NPG is a global company, with
headquarters in London and offices in Paris, Munich, New Delhi, Tokyo,
Melbourne, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, New York and Boston. See
<http://npg.nature.com/> for further information.

International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance) has been a leader in
information technology since 1966 (and was formerly nkown as the Graphic
Communications Association). The goal of IDEAlliance is to enable publishers
and other information-driven enterprises to strategize, innovate,
standardize and implement information technology solutions in an open and
cooperative cross-industry environment. See <http://www.idealliance.org/>
for further information.