Shared Shelf
Partnership plans to launch networked image management platform
July 12, 2009
ARTstor, eight partner colleges and universities, and the Society of
Architectural Historians have embarked upon a new initiative for the
management and sharing of digital images called "Shared Shelf." The
institutional partners include Colby College, Cornell University,
Harvard University, Middlebury College, New York University, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami, and Yale
University. Harvard and Yale are serving as lead partners. The project
intends to make it practical for institutions, large and small, to
combine images created by individuals, those held by the institution,
and those in ARTstor's database - and to do so without the need for
local on-site infrastructure.
Partners are contributing significant staff knowledge and time, in
addition to investment funds, and ARTstor is developing the common
software platform. The goal is to create an efficient and innovative
infrastructure informed by the shared expertise of key participating
institutions.
James Shulman, President of ARTstor, acknowledged the value of the
partnership to ARTstor's efforts to serve the educational community.
"Working with such experienced partners will help to build a system to
unlock images from archives all around the campus as well as from
scholars' own collections. ARTstor's collections are a good starting
point, but a platform that enables all of us to standardize and share
material promises to be both efficient and effective."
The initiative will enable institutions to build, manage, access and
share visual content across their own campuses, with other campuses -
or, in the case of the Society of Architectural Historians, across a
geographically distributed community of scholars. Because the platform
will enable institutions to integrate their own images with ARTstor's
digital image library (of more than one million images) and also allow
campuses to share content in a range of ways, the platform will
facilitate the expansion of a trusted and collaborative network of
institutions, and their individual users. The project also aims to
lower institutions' costs in supporting the management of image
collections by developing a common infrastructure upon which this
content can be stored and accessed.
The project has developed from ARTstor's pilot "hosting" program, which
now includes almost two million images from 130 colleges, universities,
and museums. Each institution's images are served back to the
institution (or consortium) via ARTstor's online library platform, and
each institution's images are seamlessly integrated and cross-searchable
with ARTstor's own collections. This ability to bring together
institutional and ARTstor collections has been very valuable to scholars
and teachers in many different academic fields.
During the past year, the Society of Architectural Historians and
ARTstor launched the first use of Shared Shelf, called SAHARA (The
Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive
www.saharaonline.org). SAHARA allows SAH members to upload their own
images and metadata to their own shared online archive as well as to
download the shared images for teaching and research. Commenting on the
transformative nature of SAHARA, SAH Executive Director Pauline Saliga
stated: "The leadership and members of the Society are excited about
the potential of this user-contributed, shared online academic resource.
Our expectation is that it will dramatically change the way we do
research in the field of architectural history by providing vast amounts
of data and thousands of images that can be used to provide comparative
examples, test theories, and challenge our common wisdom about both
world monuments and the ordinary buildings of our everyday lives."
Perspectives from Institutional Partners:
* Clem Guthro, Director of the Libraries at Colby College noted,
"As a small college, we need to support users across the curriculum as
simply as possible and without a lot of specialized staff to assist
them. We believe that this platform will manage the complexity behind
the scenes and let our small staff do what we do best - catalog content
and serve users."
* "Since Cornell has been working on digital image management
for a long time," University Librarian Anne Kenney noted, "we have tried
a lot of approaches. The key for Cornell was the ability to marry our
local need to support the curriculum with a single system that provides
access to vetted resources, supports individual contributions, and
allows us to broadly share images with our partner institutions and the
world."
* For decision-makers at Harvard, where an infrastructure for
image management and use for 21 different departments was implemented in
the 1990s, the partnership was attractive because of the joint
investment that will update the cataloging systems and leverage
protocols enabling interoperation with authority files, repository and
discovery environments. "Images are becoming ever more important in
both teaching and research. As a community we have lacked good tools
for their management and discovery." Dale Flecker, Associate Director
for Planning and Systems, Harvard University Library Office for
Information Systems noted. "Images present significant challenges.
Having worked with ARTstor for years in this domain, we believe that
combining forces and know-how offers the most promising approach to
these challenges."
* Mike Roy, Dean of Library and Information Services, Chief
Information Officer and Librarian at Middlebury added, "Even on our
relatively small campus, we have many different systems for managing
digital collections and none of these systems talk very well to each
other or to the rest of the world. In tough budgetary times, that
neither makes good fiscal sense nor allows our users to get the most out
of the diverse image collections that we're building."
* At NYU, library staff anticipate that participation in the
program will not only integrate collections (from the Institute of Fine
Arts, the art history department downtown, the Institute for the Study
of the Ancient World, and the libraries) but also will reduce
infrastructure support costs. "Managing separate servers and different
applications for each unit in order to provide image resources to our
community is not practical, efficient or desirable. We can no longer
expend time and resources in this manner. We need an enterprise
solution," Roddy Austin, Director of Information Technology and Media
Services for the Division of Libraries. "By creating Shared Shelf on a
'Software as a Service' model, ARTstor and the partnership will take on
the infrastructure headaches that we require to be well managed, but
don't want to manage ourselves."
* The University of Illinois Library and its College of Fine and
Applied Arts are spearheading an effort focused on supporting the needs
of scholars across campus whose work depends upon their ability to find
and utilize high quality visual information in the context of research
and learning. "The ARTstor Shared Shelf initiative provides Illinois
scholars with access to unique local treasures and globally-renowned
collections of visual resources in one flexible and powerful
environment" comments Beth Sandore, Associate University Librarian for
Information Technology Planning and Policy and Associate Dean of
Libraries. "By working with ARTstor in partnership with colleagues at
other institutions, we see the potential to emerge with a service that
unites locally distributed image management functions in a scalable and
standards-driven system, with the added benefit of the accumulated
knowledge from our colleagues at other institutions and at ARTstor. We
believe all the ingredients are present for a much stronger product to
emerge from this collaboration."
* Bill Walker, Dean of the Library at the University of Miami,
noted "For the past four years, University of Miami faculty have
depended on ARTstor's hosting program, which allows them to integrate
their images with the rich ARTstor collection in the classroom. The
availability of images through one central service gives students and
faculty a "one-stop shopping" resource for research, teaching and
learning across the curriculum. Additionally, hosting services,
combined with ARTstor, have allowed Miami to make unique holdings, such
as the digital assets from UM's Cuban Heritage Collection, available to
an international audience, and we are investing in Shared Shelf to make
the University's resources even more visible."
* Meg Bellinger, Director of Yale University's Office of Digital
Assets and Infrastructure, noted that "A 2004 Mellon Foundation grant
encouraged the libraries, archives, and museums on campus to further
develop collaborative projects - across their traditional domains of
practice - to better support teaching, research, and the preservation of
collections. Bringing these groups together to support Shared Shelf is
a natural next step. The initiative will allow us to build upon that
collaborative spirit to encourage the crossing of disciplinary or
operational boundaries."
With input from a committee of current hosting institutions, as well as
from the Shared Shelf partners, design and development of the platform
is underway. The new Shared Shelf initiative anticipates a launch - as
a fee-based service - by January 2011.
Updates on Shared Shelf are available by writing to ARTstor at
[log in to unmask] The partners and ARTstor will also report on
progress and future directions throughout the year at library, scholarly
meetings, and community fora.
--------------------------
Carole Ann Fabian
Planning, Outreach and Communications Officer
ARTstor
151 East 61st Street
New York, NY 10065
Voice: 212-500-2402
Fax: 212-500-2401
Email: [log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Web: www.artstor.org <http://www.artstor.org/>
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