ARTstor Enhancements

Enhancements to the Digital Library

We are very pleased to announce that we have released a number of enhancements to the
ARTstor Digital Library. As you return from the holidays, please take a moment to read
this announcement and pass it along to your ARTstor users.

In response to user feedback, we have made enhancements to the interface of the Digital
Library. These improvements should make ARTstor even easier to use, while preserving all
of the existing functionality that you have come to depend on for teaching, sharing,
study or research. The enhancements are concentrated in three areas: the Image Viewer,
the Thumbnail and Collection Browsing pages, and the Toolbar menu. In addition, we
increased the Remote Access Grace period from 14 and 90 days to 120 days for all users.

Image Viewer

* Images can now be rotated 360 degrees within the viewer.
* For presentation or testing purposes, users can now hide the
entire caption, removing the title and creator from the Image
Viewer and any descriptive information from the banner.
* Users can now see exactly what percentage of the actual image file
size they are viewing and will not be able to zoom-in past the
actual size of the image.

Thumbnail and Collection Browsing Pages

* In the Thumbnail page, images of key works of art will
increasingly be "clustered" so that users have a choice whether to
see multiple versions of the same image.
* In the Thumbnail page, users can now toggle between the familiar
Thumbnail mode and a new List Mode, which displays a scrollable
list of all the images in an Image Group or result set with their
accompanying data.
* Registered users can now save their preferred display mode to
their User Preferences.
* While in the Collection Browsing pages, users can now expand a
category to view all sub-categories by clicking on the plus sign
to the left of each category.
* The number of images within each category and sub-category is now
listed in parentheses to the right of each category title.

Toolbar

* We created separate Back and History menu buttons so that you can
navigate through ARTstor in the same way that you navigate the
Internet. The Back button permits users to step backwards through
their recently visited pages, while the History button shows a
list of the places visited during the current session.
* We altered the wording of existing menu options in the Image
Groups, View and Tools menus to make it easier for users to locate
desired menu items. Please be assured that we did not remove or
change the function of any menu items, just renamed them in more
intuitive ways.
* We collapsed the Collections and Browse Collection buttons into
one button to provide consistency when navigating across collections.

We'd like to thank you all for an exciting and productive year. We appreciate hearing
your suggestions, questions and concerns about ARTstor. Many of these enhancements are a
direct result of user feedback; please continue to contact us so we can improve ARTstor
in 2006 and beyond.