Link Love: 5/6/2011

• Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution have tapped their experts to help create the world’s first plant identification mobile app using visual search: Leafsnap. Download the free tree field guide app here.

• Laughter is the best medicine, right? Pandora has expanded their “music genome project” to include comedians, recently adding 10,000 comedy clips to its archives.

• Preservation Heritage’s MayDay initiative has come to an end, but while it’s still fresh on your mind, check out more emergency preparedness resources over at the Smithsonian Collections blog.

• How do we see artwork? The Indianapolis Museum of Art is investigating this question literally through their “First Impressions” project, which creates heatmaps of what people focus on while looking at works of art from the IMA’s collections.

• As a Kentuckian, I get particularly sentimental about the Kentucky Derby (it’s this Saturday y’all!). In celebration of the most exciting two minutes in sports, check out archival photos of the 1977 Run for the Roses from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Photographic Archives, and a History of the Derby, 1875-1921 over at the Internet Archive.

• A Getty Museum conservator speaks about how the museum recently used tree-ring dating to discover that an ornate cabinet they had assumed was a fake was actually a genuine piece of Renaissance furniture made in 1580 in Burgundy, France.

“A Renaissance Cabinet Rediscovered,” Contributor: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Courtesy of Art Babble.