[KS] Korea-centric art image searches

kevin parks kevin at macosx.com
Mon Jan 3 18:43:33 EST 2011


  I apologize in advance for what is likely a vague query but I am 
almost certain that something of this type was posted on list long ago 
and I know some people on this list have impressive research chops.

Many libraries and museums have databases of archived images, digitized 
collections of photographs or prints, maps or paintings. In some cases 
they are high resolution TIFFs and in some cases they are scans of 
images for which the copyright has expired. Others have restricted use 
or academic use and are noted or available in higher resolutions.

For example, a huge image archive can be found at the Library of 
Congress and often at large research universities. A good example of 
what I am looking for can be found here:

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
http://imageservice.cdlib.org/
http://camio.oclc.org/

There is also Artstor which contains many images in various resolutions 
but almost none of them are available for download in full resolution. 
You can view them online in a web browser in high resolution (in their 
clumsy web interface) but when you attempt to download them they are 
saved in vastly reduced quality or cropped to the zoom setting you have 
set on your browser window (you can't make the window bigger). There are 
a small handful of very high resolution images available for download 
that are marked "academic" use. But there are not a lot of these in the 
areas I am searching.

I am wondering if folks know some good image banks that have full 
resolution images available for download.

Most specifically I am interested in finding detailed high resolution 
images of paintings of Joseon Dynasty Banquets, portraits & maps such as 
one might find in the Minsokwon text /Source Materials for Korean 
Musicology, Volume 36: Paintings of the Banquets During the Joseon 
Dynasty/ (ISBN 978-89-86252-85-9) which I own. The problem is that these 
images (in real life) are enormous and the book is quite small. If I 
wanted to zoom in to see some detail (other than the details provided) 
you simply would not have enough resolution. I have several other books 
that have such images but am not able, in many case to get the detail I 
require because the images are so small.

Museums & galleries, as you might guess, are worse. The following images 
are even smaller resolution here than they are in Artstor.

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/126707.html?mulR=30424

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/105996.html?mulR=5428

Does anyone know any good sites for high resolution Korea-centric 
images? Of course there is Flicker and Google and 
image.search.naver.com, etc. which I am also grepping.

Somewhat sheepishly,

Kevin Parks
University of Virginia, Music dept.
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