Spring 2010 Newsletter

As always, tech-savvy Friends and patrons can get the GMOA newsletter here before printing is completed and physical copies are mailed. The Spring 2010 newsletter should arrive in your mailboxes relatively soon, but in the meantime, here's the digital version, which has great photos, some information on new acquisitions, construction updates and more, including a Save the Date on the back cover for Elegant Salute XII!

GMOA on Your Phone

So, if you're hip enough to have a smartphone that uses Android, Issuu, where GMOA keeps flash versions of all its newsletters and is working on archiving past brochures, is now accessible while you're out and about in the world. The company plans to introduce Issuu Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch soon, and if you follow the link above, you can sign up to be notified when it's got that ready.

Winter 2010 Newsletter

As ever, you people with digital skills get to see the GMOA newsletter first. Print copies should go out in the mail early next week, but if you prefer to click through and enjoy it on your screen, please feel free. This issue contains event photos, calendar, another spread of construction updates (in case you haven't been following them on the blog), information on volunteering at Family Days and much more.

Fall 09 Newsletter

Paper copies will go out in the mail Sept. 10, but here's the searchable, clickable, playaroundwithable electronic version.

Creating a Library

If you read Alexis Richardson's blog posts this summer, you know that she mostly worked on scanning publications for us. Well, her efforts are starting to see fruit. If you visit our library on Issuu, you'll see that we've compiled some of the pages she scanned into several pdf files and uploaded them for reading, searching, embedding and more. Past brochures on Rembrandt, French floral drawings, the sculptures of Andrew T. Crawford and more are up, and we'll continue to add more as we finalize scans. We think it's going to be a great resource for scholarship and publicity.

Digital Books

This article by Lee Shearer in the Athens Banner-Herald on UGA Press's move toward some digital printing (specifically on-demand printing of books less in demand) reminded us of a couple of related links, neither of which at first would seem to be connected. Art Daily published an article today about the British Library's digitization of the Codex Sinaiticus, the world's oldest surviving Christian bible, which dates from the 4th century. Its physical pages are scattered in the British Library, the Leipzig University Library, the Monastery of St Catherine (Mount Sinai, Egypt) and the National Library of Russia (St Petersburg), so the website the library has created is the only way to see all of them at once, let alone flip through the book. Similarly, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore posted three high-resolution digitized Korans on Issuu (a two-page spread from one appears above).

Both these projects and the efforts of UGA Press allow us to think about the spread of works of art and books in the digital age. It's true, there's nothing like holding a physical book in your hand, but there are other ways in which digital versions are an improvement, such as the fact that they're vastly easier to search. We don't plan on relying on digital printing or digital distribution any time in the near future (color reproduction isn't there yet for the former, and the latter often doesn't have color at all, as in the case of the Kindle), but we are working on digitizing our entire collection of brochures and smaller booklets, to cut down on the storage space needed and to promote scholarship. Currently, if someone's writing a book on, for example, Earl McCutcheon, and sees that we had an exhibition of his work with a large brochure, it's difficult to go find that brochure, expensive to mail it and hard to find the space to store it. When we're finished, we should be able just to burn a CD or, better still, send a link, plus these publications will be searchable. Hooray for the future!

GMOA Summer Newsletter

Hey, web-savvy people. You get to see the summer newsletter before anyone else does. It's still in the process of being printed, whereupon it'll go out in the mail, but if you want to see all the events, news, photos and more now, just click above and browse around in it. Note that all links are live, so if you browse over a link on the page and want to go there, you should be able just to click on it and go there. You'll also have to click on the page to zoom in and read it at high resolution. Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art, of course, get mailed their own print copies to mark up or post on the fridge or save in a scrapbook, so we certainly encourage you to join.

New Media

On Thursday, April 30, the Department of Communications (that is, PR and Publications) at the Georgia Museum of Art attended a "Lunch and Learn" session organized by the Webmaster Developers Group on the UGA Campus that focused on Nxtbook Media, a digital publishing service that creates embeddable, emailable, archivable Flash versions of publications from PDFs. Nxtbook is a snazzier version of Issuu, which we've been using already, as with our newsletter below.

Issuu doesn't have as many features as Nxtbook, but it's free, at least for the moment, and it's allowing us to put up more publications online. We've embedded the newsletter on our homepage, and we'd like to keep pushing forward into digital publishing. It's not the approach we'd like to take for our catalogues, but for smaller brochures, newsletters, and possibly out-of-print books, we'd like to keep making use of it. Let us know if there's anything else you'd like us to use Issuu for and if you've enjoyed what we've posted so far.

New Discoveries in Georgia Painted Furniture

Open publication - Free publishing - More history

This publication, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name in January 2008, was so popular that we've given away almost every copy we had printed. We don't doubt that we'll keep getting requests for it, so we've archived the whole thing on Issuu, embedded above. It's not quite the same as with the beautiful paper we printed it on, but it's in the ballpark.