Limited offer: 20% discount on Bridgeman Education subscription

The first 50 to register for Bridgeman Education’s updated and freshly designed resource will receive extended trial access and a 20% discount off subscription for the first year. Contact Bridgeman Education for more information.

Bridgeman Education provided me with trial access in order to feed into this research project. The design is definitely fresh; very clean with lots of white space to enable the images to take centre stage. Some of the features I liked the most were:

• The zoom feature is intuitive and easy to use, and many images can be zoomed to view details such as brush strokes, for a great experience try the following:
  • Gogh, Vincent van (1853-90). 1890. Bouquet of flowers. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
  • Freud, Lucian (b. 1922). 1991. Leigh Bowery. Private Collection.
• Search results can be sorted by relevance, image number, artist name, artist nationality or medium.
• The simple search is useful enough without the advanced search, even though this has been integrated well. I found that once I had done a simple search being able to click on the hyperlinked artist name was brilliant. They have also hyperlinked the keywords field.
• Good error messages: they have really thought about the user experience and automatic feedback is sent to the developers.

The SlideShow feature

One of the best features is the renovated slideshow experience. Images can be added from thumbnail results page, or core record page. There is a permanent slideshow tool bar at the top right of the screen; when you first login this is a blank square, but when you start adding images, the current slideshow displays a miniature version of the images chosen. This is a very good visual reminder. The toolbar also has very helpful tooltips over the icons to the extent that I did not need the help section at all.

Once you have added images to the slideshow more features can be accessed. Cropping images is easy, and can be reset with the click of a button at anytime, the slides can be organised into twos or fours, and there are a few other viewing options. There is a choice of Artist Name, Title, and one editable field called Caption.

Slideshows can be downloaded as a PDF document, or in a zip folder, which once extracted works like a small website. It would be great if it was possible to add additional images to the slideshow from other image libraries or collections. The XML file that is provided with the zipped download can be edited to do this, I have tried and can report that it works, but depending on the number of images this could be time consuming.

Links:

• Bridgeman Education website
• Contact Bridgeman Education regarding subscription
• Read more about the features in the Website User Manual (PDF)