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
Web:
www.artstor.org