Click, zoom in, repeat: Yale art trove grows online

"Yale’s Center for British Art is closed until May amid a sweeping, year-long renovation, but its virtual doors are wide open, offering thousands of images in detail as precise as your screen can manage. Matthew Hargraves, chief curator of art collections, said the museum launched its online collection in 2011 with a selection of images of paintings. But the last batch put online, coinciding roughly with Public Domain Day on Jan. 1, was a huge addition of 22,000 images from the prints and drawings collection ... But the online collection goes beyond that, offering a total of about 69,000 public domain images that you can quickly access from your home computer through a few clicks. The image resolution ranges from display-sized jpegs to full-page TIFF downloads and even JPEG 2000, a file format that allows images to be studied in high resolution and minute detail. It represents a trend toward open access made possible by broadband Internet and advances in digital imaging and storage ..."