Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en), the large consortium of museums, archives, and libraries in Europe, released the Art Up Your Tab plug-in for the Chrome browser in April of this year, and in August made it available for use with the Firefox browser. Europeana's developers say that there is a set of images related to fire and foxes loaded in the Firefox version. Once installed, every time a new tab or window is opened in the browser, its background is a full-screen image selected from the over 53 million digitized items in Europeana's collections. Images are accompanied by descriptive caption information, including the artist, the institution that contributed the image, license information, and can be downloaded and reused instantly. The first few images we saw after installing the plug-in included a late 19th century Japanese print; a 1950s photo of a Dutch family of 10; a miniature painting of a marine officer, created in 1759 by Dutch painter Joseph Marinkel; and a 1924 pink and black chalk drawing of a unicorn by another Dutch artist, Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof. (The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands is a major contributor to Europeana and has a liberal usage policy for its images.) Europeana hopes "that seeing inspiring and unexpected artworks will make you put your busy life on hold for a brief moment and spark your imagination."
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