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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. _________________________________________________________________ Chronicle subscribers can read this article on the Web at this address: http://chronicle.com/free/2001/04/2001040501t.htm If you would like to have complete access to The Chronicle's Web site, a special subscription offer can be found at: http://chronicle.com/4free Use the code D00CM when ordering. _________________________________________________________________ You may visit The Chronicle as follows: * via the World-Wide Web, at http://chronicle.com * via telnet at chronicle.com _________________________________________________________________ Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education __________________________________________________________________ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] Administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at: [log in to unmask]