Apologies for cross-posting.

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For Art History Scholars, Illumination Is a Click Away

August 14, 2004
 By KAREN W. ARENSON

Doctors have stethoscopes. Plumbers have wrenches. And
art-history professors have slides.

Or at least that's the way it has been. But now, a
vast
digital library of world art has gone online with its
first
300,000 images. The project - known as ARTstor and
financed
by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - could eventually
revolutionize the way art history is taught and
studied. It
is available for nonprofit institutions only.

The way technology has been able to transform
education is
remarkable, said Neil Rudenstine, the former Harvard
University president who is now chairman of ARTstor.
"That
only happens, if you are lucky, once a century."

Marguerite A. Keane, an adjunct lecturer at the
University
of California, San Diego, certainly feels lucky. Using
ARTstor last spring during its test phase, Ms. Keane
said
she was able to assemble all the images for her
semester-long course, "Introduction to Art History,"
in a
few hours, the time it normally takes to gather slides
for
one class. If a student referred to a picture, she
could
usually locate it immediately and show it in class,
zooming
in on any details she wanted. "It was extraordinary,"
she
said.

Walter Melion, the former art-history department
chairman
at Johns Hopkins University, who also used ARTstor in
the
spring to teach "History of Early Modern Printmaking,"
said
that using ARTstor's images was like "entering the
print
with your eye."

Mr. Melion, who is moving to Emory University this
fall,
added that he had begun to use ARTstor for research,
too,
because it allowed him to see Latin inscriptions that
he
could not otherwise make out unless he had an original
print in front of him and a magnifying glass.

In an era in which nearly everything is available
online,
it is easy to take such availability for granted.
There is
abundant art on the Internet. And Corbis, created by
Bill
Gates, the software billionaire, is building a large,
electronic archive of visual images.

But the needs of teachers, museum curators and other
scholars are often different from those of other
viewers.
"The kinds of things that are salable commercially,"
Mr.
Rudenstine said, "are not the things you need in a
classroom - things like Parmigianino drawings or tiny
little horses carved by some monk on a piece of
ivory."

And, he added, scholars need a classification system
that
is coherent - more Library of Congress than eBay.

ARTstor is not the first attempt to satisfy those
needs.
Thirty-nine museums, including the Metropolitan Museum
of
Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J.
Paul
Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Victoria & Albert
Museum in London, now contribute to an online library
of
high-quality art images known as the Art Museum Image
Consortium, or Amico. It now has more than 100,000
images
online.

But Amico announced this summer that despite more than
two
million licensed users, it plans to close next year.
ARTstor is paying Amico a fee and will acquire some of
its
intellectual resources.

"It was very clear that when the Mellon Foundation
decided
to launch ARTstor with its much bigger reach, that it
would
be logical for us to look at some kind of relationship
with
them," said Michael Conforti, director of the Sterling
and
Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.,
and
Amico's current chairman. "It is good for the field
and
good for users."

As anyone who has taken art history knows, slides are
central to the instruction. But assembling 50 or 100
slides
for a single class can take hours. What's more, slides
are
a waning technology. For example, the Eastman Kodak
Company
stopped making slide projectors in June. And while
other
companies still make projectors, many colleges have
begun
inching toward digitization.

Going digital, however, can be expensive, and colleges
began turning to Mellon, a wealthy New York-based
foundation that emphasizes higher education and art,
for
help. Mellon was already engaged in another
digital-imaging
project - Jstor - to make hundreds of years of
articles
from scholarly journals available online.

So far, Mellon has poured more than $30 million into
ARTstor (www.artstor.org), which became a
free-standing
charitable organization this year and has started to
solicit paying subscribers.

But Mellon is not planning to end its support anytime
soon.
"We have understood from the very start of ARTstor
that it
would be expensive to accomplish what we wanted to
accomplish, and that we would have to continue to make
substantial philanthropic investments," said William
G.
Bowen, Mellon's president.

Mellon has found that putting journal articles online
and
putting art online are very different undertakings.
The
universe of art is far larger. Creating a searchable
database of images is more complex. Image quality is
more
important. And copyright issues are more complicated.

The biggest chunk of ARTstor's current collection came
from
the University of California, San Diego, where the
slides
were already cataloged. ARTstor is also creating new
images. Mellon has put up more than $7 million to
photograph mural paintings and sculptures in Buddhist
cave
shrines in Dunhuang, China, in the Gobi Desert, as
well as
materials taken from them and now in museums around
the
world. In the caves, a photographic team has mounted
cameras on tracks and is taking shots every two
inches.

"Eventually we will probably take tons of
contributions,"
James Shulman, ARTstor's executive director, said.
"But
right now we are trying to act strategically and keep
the
collection focused on what users need most."

One gaping hole is modern art. Because of
international
copyright considerations, ARTstor has not yet put
online
many works created since 1924, while it negotiates
with
groups representing modern and contemporary artists.

So far, 95 colleges and museums have subscribed,
including
Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, Edison Community
College in Florida, Arizona State University and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

One issue for some is cost. ARTstor has a sliding
scale for
users. Community colleges are charged a one-time fee
of
$1,000 and an annual user fee of $1,200. But the
largest
research universities will pay a front-end fee of
$40,000
and $20,000 a year. Front-end fees for museums range
between $600 and $10,000, and annual fees go from $500
to
$5,000.

Although art is the main focus now, ARTstor officials
say
they may eventually offer collections in other
disciplines,
too. They are experimenting with botany and astronomy.


For now, most institutions will probably straddle both
worlds. Mr. Conforti says that the Clark Museum, which
works closely with Williams College, continues to "buy
slides at a great rate and catalog them in the
old-fashioned way."

"If we did not have a sensitivity to the faculty of
the
college who have an unwillingness to change
immediately,"
he said, "we would be limiting their ability to teach
in a
way they find comfortable, and robbing the students."

But he added: "No matter how one feels, the world is
going
digital. This is only a transition moment. It will
end."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/arts/design/14ART.html?ex=1093505536&ei=1&en=93f90ceb572bc43b


---------------------------------
Corey Schultz,
VR Guy
Dept. of Art & Art History
Stanford University

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