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NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
February 5, 2003


                      ARTstor: http://www.artstor.org 

Although many of us have known about it for a while, ARTstor now has 
a web presence. Below I reproduce the welcome message from the 
chairman, Neil Rudenstine, and the executive director, James Shulman. 
Still building and testing its collections, ARTstor will not be 
available until the 2003-2004 academic year. However, it is good to 
have a place where one can learn about the progress of this important 
new resource.

David Green
===========



Welcome to ARTstor, an initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

ARTstor's purpose is to create a large - and indefinitely growing - 
database of digital images and accompanying scholarly information for 
use in art history and other humanistic fields of learning, including 
the related social sciences.

ARTstor will be a not-for-profit organization, and its materials will 
only be made available for use by not-for-profit educational 
institutions, such as colleges and universities, museums, libraries, 
research institutes and similar organizations. The goal is to enhance 
teaching, scholarship and learning in fields of knowledge that use 
images and associated scholarly materials for study and research, as 
well as in lectures, classrooms, conferences and similar settings.

ARTstor's objective in creating its database is to carefully select 
"collections" that are intrinsically significant, and that have 
sufficient breadth, depth and coherence to make them genuinely useful 
to faculty, curators, students and others.

Over time, ARTstor hopes to build - in collaboration with other 
institutions - a database that will consist of millions of images and 
related data. It will include collections from a wide variety of 
civilizations, time-periods, and media, as well as from different 
sources, such as museums, archaeological sites, photo-archives, slide 
collections, and published materials that promise to be unusually 
helpful as scholarly tools. Users will be able to search across an 
individual "collection" in the database or across multiple 
collections, as a single large "library" of materials.

Participation in ARTstor will be through institutional site licenses. 
Fees will be set according to a sliding-scale based on a number of 
institutional characteristics. The object is to make participation as 
broad as possible across a great range of educational institutions, 
while generating some revenue to offset a share of ARTstor's 
considerable operating costs. The ARTstor database will be able to be 
accessed directly by any individual who is an authenticated member of 
a participating institution. Users will gain access to the 
collections by two routes: (1) through this website, which will add 
functionality for searching, browsing, saving, and presenting on a 
regular basis and (2) through Insight (a product of Luna Imaging, 
Inc.). Over time, we will also work to create bridges that will allow 
institutions that prefer to use software of their own to work with 
content in the ARTstor database.

ARTstor began as an organization in the early fall of 2001. During 
the past eighteen months, it has been creating its initial digital 
collections, addressing technology issues, consulting with members of 
the museum and academic communities, and preparing for the time - 
during the academic year 2003-2004 - when materials could be made 
available for use at educational institutions.

While we hope that these initial collections will be useful from the 
very start, we also want to underscore a number of important points:

First, even the initial collections will not be complete at the time 
of release, simply because the process of creating a coherent group 
of images and data is highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. The 
entire process - from choosing a project; reaching institutional 
collaborative agreements; undertaking photography (or digitizing 
already-existing images); updating catalog information; and guiding 
the entire production process carefully to ensure quality-control - 
is complex as well as costly, and it simply cannot be rushed. 
Consequently, the content and size of the initial database will 
inevitably be illustrative of what can be achieved over time as new 
material is added. We hope that, within the next eighteen months, we 
will have something in the range of 400,000 images and data online. 
But even that - measured against the infinite universe of art-objects 
- is obviously only the barest of beginnings.

Second, while ARTstor can do a considerable amount in creating an 
inter-institutional network, as well as building online collections, 
it is clear that no single organization can possibly do more than a 
small fraction of what needs to be accomplished if the national and 
international community of educational institutions is to be 
well-served. The hope, therefore, is that the ARTstor database and 
network can soon begin to function as a public utility that would 
eventually become a very broad-based co-operative enterprise, with 
participating institutions contributing digital materials while 
simultaneously benefiting from the growing database. ARTstor will 
exercise responsibility for maintaining - and adding significantly to 
- this database, just as it will maintain the complex systems (and 
staff) essential to this initiative. But we fully expect that there 
will come a time when the not-for-profit educational community of 
museums, colleges, universities and others will essentially "own" and 
operate the system.

Third, while ARTstor considers its primary purpose to be the creation 
and provision of digital images and related materials for scholarly 
and instructional use, it also hopes to do more than "deliver a 
product." In fact, because so little is known about the most 
effective ways to build and use digital collections of this kind, we 
will need advice, criticism, suggestions - and even some patience! - 
from participating institutions, so that we can all learn together 
about users needs, software adaptations, image quality standards, 
metadata standards, and collection-building. As with any new 
technology, we expect that any number of mistakes will inevitably be 
made along the way, and that only a community-wide effort - sharing 
expertise, experience, and new ideas - can lead to genuinely useful 
and enriching results.

In the meanwhile, please read and ponder, and check back as we update 
the site over the coming months.

With best regards -

Neil Rudenstine and James Shulman
     

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