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When asked by LTS to write of my impressions of the technology resources on campus my first thought was that they could not have asked a more unlikely candidate. As a new faculty member in the Design & Facilities Department, it has been taxing enough familiarizing myself with new peers, students, classes, and facilities let alone converting from PC to Mac. So, while still finding my way in the Wentworth environment, I would like to believe I could be forgiven for not launching myself into learning the latest that LTS had to offer above and beyond the basic WebCT training.

William Burroughs was said to have remarked that "desperation is the raw material of drastic change", and it is for this reason alone that I can comment on urgent need of high quality images for a furniture design class I am teaching this semester. ARTstor is a scholarly and educational resource which has saved me countless hours of research and scanning with an accessible database of hundreds of thousands of art and design related images from some of the most important museum collections in the country. Of particular interest to designers and engineers alike is The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Architecture & Design Collection that offers an outstanding source of industrial and material objects as well as graphic and photographic imagery.

As stated on its website, ARTstor is a non-profit initiative, founded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to -enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. Accessed through the Alumni Library site on LConnect, the one-time registration permits both faculty and students unlimited access to its growing slide database with search engine functions, customized cataloging features as well as a proprietary presentation/slide show tool. The software was designed with a dynamically interactive magnification tool, while in presentation mode, to take advantage of the exceptional resolution at which the slides are stored. Users can seamlessly integrate images from their own files and, equally convenient, is the ability to build and present a cached collection of images while off-line.

As someone who lacks both the time and patience to plod through yet another new technology, I can attest to the fact that ARTstor has an extremely intuitive and user-friendly browser interface even for someone as digitally impatient as myself. Given that the collection will grow to nearly 500,000 images by the end of this year, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with this teaching and learning resource if only for the pure pleasure of browsing the best collections of our visual culture.