The permanent collection of the (US) National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago contains more than 2,500 pieces of art by 250 artists, all of which can be seen at
NVAM Collection Online. The site includes biographical material on the artists who created the work.
Featured Artwork.
A small selection.
(Via. Images at links in this post may be nsfw, and/or disturbing to some viewers.)
posted by zarq
on Nov 12, 2012 -
1 comment
The Useless Web serves a collection of some of the most frivolous, insignificant and worthless websites (many of which were previously seen here).
Obvious Warning: May contain sound, flashing images, old memes or peanuts. Well, probably not peanuts.
posted by oneswellfoop
on Nov 12, 2012 -
48 comments
Phone Trips - an audio archive of the Phone Phreaking community. Phone phreaking was the practice of hacking into phone systems and networks in order to explore these networks and their connections [
1 2]. Many people first heard about the phenomenon in a 1971 Esquire article,
Secrets of the Little Blue Box, which included input from
Captain Crunch. Crunch discovered that you could access telephone networks by blowing a 2600 Hz tone, from a whistle given away free in cereal boxes, into telephone handsets. "Have you ever heard eight tandems stacked up?" asked Crunch in the interview. Well, now we can, thanks to a large audio archive of phone phreaking.
[more inside]
posted by carter
on Aug 31, 2012 -
29 comments
On July 22, 2012,
Herb Vogel passed away. Herb worked his entire life for the US Postal Service, while his wife Dorothy worked for the Brooklyn Public Library. In spite of their
humble backgrounds,
the couple were renowned in art circles for amassing over the course of decades a deeply personal collection of over 2500 pieces of 20th C. contemporary American art, a collection so vast that it could not be housed in the
National Gallery of Art. A traveling exhibition entitled
Fifty Works in Fifty States was set up to share the Vogel's treasures with the American public in museums across the country, as well as online. The wonderful story of the deep love that the Vogels shared for each other and their passion for art, beauty and human creativity was told in the eponymous documentary
Herb and Dorothy.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 7, 2012 -
21 comments
New Scientist - Every issue from its launch in November 1956 through to December 1989. Well, confusingly, one issue with a cover date of November 1952 but with contents from 1959.
[more inside]
posted by unliteral
on May 10, 2012 -
31 comments
John Peel's Record Collection "Online interactive digital museum"
The Space has begun the mammoth task of digitising DJ John Peel's record collection. Now, nearly 8 years after his death, the first 100 albums under the letter A are ready, with a new letter to be released every week. With bonus content such as photos, Peel Sessions and
samples of radio shows (Spotify may be required for some audio), it's a fascinating look inside the great man's never-ending enthusiasm for music.
posted by jontyjago
on May 1, 2012 -
31 comments
Moscow of 1931 is a collection of hand-tinted lantern slides by Branson DeCou, an American photographer and travelogue lecturer who traveled the world for 30 years before his death in 1941. You can view more of the DeCou corpus online at the
Branson Decou Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz where they've been attempting to sort, preserve, identify and digitize 10,000 DeCou slides received in 1971, a gift referred to the university chancellor by photographer Ansel Adams.
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Apr 14, 2012 -
16 comments
The web site of
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than 30,000 images searchable by who, what, where, and when.
posted by Trurl
on Mar 8, 2012 -
11 comments
It's the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month where I am right now, so I present to you
Europeana, a project collecting memorabilia and stories from the period of the Great War (1914-1918).
posted by unliteral
on Nov 10, 2011 -
30 comments
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library today launched its latest online research tool, the Production Art Database. The database contains records for more than 5,300 items from the library’s collection, including motion picture costume and production design drawings, animation art, storyboards and paintings. Nearly half of the records include images, making this an invaluable online resource for researchers interested in motion picture design.
posted by Trurl
on Jul 2, 2011 -
7 comments
Over the past 30 years, designer, writer and Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research
Bill Buxton has collected input and interactive devices whose designs he found "interesting, useful or important. In the process, he has assembled a good collection of the history of pen computing, pointing devices, touch technologies, as well as an illustration of the nature of how new technologies emerge." This week, he
unveiled his collection at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. An extensive gallery has been posted online with images and notes at
The Buxton Collection.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 11, 2011 -
6 comments
"...it's probably extra easy to trace my life & interests through these galleries. They start out in Kansas (most of the early non-Lawrence/ KC ones were sent to me either by people ordering copies of my zine or by a few pals of mine who had run away to CA), and as I move around in life the bands & venues change accordingly: Kansas, Ohio, Washington DC, Kansas again, Arizona."
The Jason Willis Flyer Collection, 1981-2006
posted by nomadicink
on Oct 3, 2010 -
4 comments
I'm like a character in a dystopian science-fiction novel, holed up in a cave full of cultural artefacts, waiting for the young Jenny Agutter to arrive in a tinfoil miniskirt, fleeing a poisonous cloud on the surface, to check out my stash and ask me: "Who exactly was the Quicksilver Messenger Service? Who was this Virginia Woolf? What kind of man was Jonah Hex?" - Stewart Lee on
comics, books, CDs and shelves. Many, many feet of shelves.
posted by Artw
on Aug 1, 2010 -
26 comments
Mendeley is a cross-platform research management tool which features article databasing, PDF annotation, online backup, private, shared and public collections, metadata lookup on Google Scholar, direct exporting of multiple citation styles to Word, OpenOffice and BibTex, the ability to add documents directly from a web browser, and social networking with other members in your field of study. Like
Zotero (
previously), but out of the browser and with note-taking abilities. For Windows, Mac and Linux.
posted by l33tpolicywonk
on Jun 11, 2010 -
27 comments
The Whatsisname Collection. A number of years ago there was a place called A&S Magazines on 40th Street behind the Port Authority, which sold used magazines. One week I went in there and they had this particular collection of magazines, boxes and boxes of them, which they were selling quite cheap, because they had all been defaced. A gentleman in Connecticut had been buying magazines - mostly men’s magazines - for several decades, from the forties to the early seventies - and deconstructing them. He would take them apart, and then he would make a new magazine from the remnants of several, arranging the pages to highlight certain stories and downplay others. He would staple the pages back into the cover, and then he would cross out whatever stories weren’t in his version with a wax pencil. Finally he would stamp his name on the cover and number the whole thing, presumably for his "library." Even though vintage, these oddly shaped, crude reassemblages really wouldn’t appeal to many people. Obviously I bought as many as I could. Michael Kupperman's Whatsisname Collection --
Part 1 //
Part 2.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates
on May 9, 2010 -
15 comments
AMASSBLOG my name is james phillips williams. most everyone calls me jp. i have been a designer in new york for 20 years. i started this blog at the urging of my friends and fellow designers who were familiar with my manic collecting. my collections are varied but generally have to do with typography or design.
posted by OmieWise
on Aug 31, 2009 -
11 comments
Circuits are flipping on in the
nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago,
31 "digerati" -- like
Clay Shirky,
Chris Anderson, and
George Oates --
dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference
"Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age".
Dan Cohen of the
Center for History and New Media provides
a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by
watching the keynotes, paging through the
Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the
blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out
a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's
website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old
"Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on
Twitter, listen to its
podcasts, watch its
YouTube channel, visit the
Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the
FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's
ruby slippers,
Hope diamond,
Negro Leagues baseball, or
coelocanth.
posted by Miko
on Feb 27, 2009 -
13 comments
"Collected during my time working from Bangalore,
these matchboxes are the tangible memories of my various travels and experiences through India."
via (with interview)
posted by gman
on Feb 13, 2009 -
26 comments
The Archive. A short film by
Sean Dunn and
Ed David.
"The world is dead out there. They have their ears closed. They don't understand what's going on at this moment. It's gonna take them 10, 15, 20 years to wake up and realize what they missed." Nobody has more records than
Paul Mawhinney. He's ready to sell the whole thing for 6 cents on the dollar of their worth. 3 million records for $1 each. And nobody is buying. (
Previously on Mefi.)
[more inside]
posted by grabbingsand
on Aug 20, 2008 -
24 comments
So lemony and wonderful. Of course I searched the Metafilter Archives. I wanted to be sure I was not reposting a link. But I did find one reference to moist towelettes from
machaus
"Many individuals have asked me in past months, Why moist towelette collecting? Why not stamp collecting, or numismatics? To be different, perhaps? "
posted by machaus (12 comments total) back in 2001.
Well -- Machaus -- now you know where you can leave your collection when preparing your will.
posted by RubberHen
on Jul 29, 2008 -
27 comments
