Jill,

I'm not sure I can help put this in context, but here is another article
with a different slant.  It's from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Thursday, April 5, 2001


Foundation Will Create 'ArtSTOR,' a Digital Archive for Art
and Architecture

By FLORENCE OLSEN

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a plan on Wednesday
to create a comprehensive digital-slide library of art and
architecture for teaching and research.
Although many colleges and museums have begun digitizing
images of items in their own art collections, Mellon plans to
build a systematic collection of digital materials for
teaching a large range of core art-history courses.
"'Core' here doesn't necessarily mean traditional and stuffy,"
said James L. Shulman, a financial and administrative officer
at the foundation who will become the executive director of
ArtSTOR, a nonprofit organization. ArtSTOR's founders said
they will first offer a set of images for the most popular
art-history courses on campuses, among them courses in African
and Islamic art.
Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard University's president, will be
the chairman of the project's advisory board until he steps
down from his Harvard post on July 1. Mr. Rudenstine will then
become board chairman of ArtSTOR. The organization will expand
digital art collections and license them for use by colleges
and cultural institutions around the world.
While many museums and libraries around the country are
engaged in small-scale projects to digitize their own
collections of visual materials, scholars say no organizations
have stepped in to coordinate those activities in a systematic
way that would make those images accessible to many scholars
and students.
"What's created tends to stay where it is, and there isn't an
established standard for what level of image quality is
minimally acceptable," Mr. Rudenstine said.
Many art scholars have not benefited yet from the limited
sources of digital materials because the quality is
unacceptable, said Alan Wallach, a professor of art history
and American studies at the College of William and Mary. "I
can imagine endless uses for a 50,000-, 100,000-, or
500,000-image digital archive."
But for now, Mr. Wallach said, he prefers his slide carousel
for teaching and scholarship. "The quality has not gotten to
the point where a projected digital image compares with a
slide image," he said.
In the mid-1990's, the Mellon Foundation provided the seed
money for another scholarly venture, JSTOR, which became a
self-sustaining, nonprofit library service. JSTOR, which
stands for "journal storage," created a searchable database of
out-of-print journals so that libraries that were running out
of space could store their back issues. In doing so, JSTOR
made the journals easily accessible to scholars and preserved
their content.
Eventually, ArtSTOR's visual contents will be linked to
JSTOR's scholarly-journal articles.
ArtSTOR will seek non-exclusive, royalty-free licenses to
compile an archive of digitized images and to distribute those
images internationally to nonprofit organizations for
educational and research purposes. "This is a huge undertaking
that we don't take on lightly," Mr. Shulman said.
Daniel Greenstein, the director of the Digital Library
Federation, a group of libraries interested in digital
technologies, described JSTOR and ArtSTOR as "community
distribution services." By providing such services, he said,
the Mellon Foundation can have "a significant impact on
scholarly culture."
Mellon has gained considerable digitizing experience already
from several pilot projects. One $1.7-million pilot involves
more than 6,000 items in the design collection of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York. Another is a $3-million project to
digitize and interpret 4th- to 14th-century Buddhist art
preserved in inaccessible caves in Dunhuang, China. Mellon
refers to these as "deep scholarly collections," which will be
part of ArtSTOR, too.
"Although we all assume that in 20 years every image will be
digitized, right now it's still very costly to do," Mr.
Shulman said. ArtSTOR will use as sources a mix of slides,
photographs, and images taken with digital cameras. "The
quality of the photography really determines how much you're
going to be able to do with it," Mr. Shulman said.
Executives of the project did not announce a date when the
first ArtSTOR services would be offered.
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Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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