Toward a cultural community
A trusted third party
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation created ARTstor precisely to be this kind of "trusted third party." This new member of the arts and higher education community would, from the outset, work with all of these constituencies on an international stage. ARTstor's mission is, in a nutshell, to help higher education institutions respond to the complex and expensive set of challenges described above via the ficticious Professor Smith. How shall we build the kind of digital image library required by scholars, teachers, and students in the 21st century? How can the key aspects of this emerging digital library - its collections and services, its provision for intellectual access, its software tools, its technical infrastructure, its licensing and legal framework - be made scalable, sustainable...and affordable? How can we, as a community, address the challenges that have, so far, prevented these clearly desirable aspirations from becoming attainable goals? ARTstor (www.artstor.org) went live in July 2004, and we're still answering some of these questions. We hope to work with archives, libraries, museums, teachers, and scholars to help higher education institutions achieve together something that has proved elusive so far. The roles ARTstor hopes to play are several:Balancing stakeholder interests
One of ARTstor's greatest challenges is to balance the concerns, interests, and needs of content owners (archives, libraries, and, especially, museums, both here and abroad) and those of potential users of digital content, predominantly in higher education. Most museums, as well as many other institutions that collect and preserve cultural objects, depend on revenues generated through commercial reproduction of their collections, whether on T-shirts and coffee mugs or in scholarly articles and books. Conversely, the purely noncommercial, educational use of images of museum objects in teaching and learning has never been a source of significant revenue; the majority of museums do not even actively make their collections available for these kinds of efforts. Only by understanding and underscoring this important distinction can the ground be cleared for developing a shared, mission-driven commitment to strengthening the educational use of digital images. ARTstor hopes to make a real contribution here. In much the same vein, it is seeking to arrive at international understandings with artists' rights groups, with the goal of defining a similar "safe haven" for the educational use of digital versions of works of 20th- and 21st-century art still under copyright in varying jurisdictions worldwide. Balancing the concerns of content owners and end users often requires compromise. For the content owner, it means remaining mindful of and actively endorsing the noncommercial, educational, and scholarly use of digital collections, even in times of dwindling resources and corresponding pressure to focus on the bottom line. For the end user, as well as for librarians representing the interests of end users, it means - for now at least - accepting that ARTstor's ability to "interoperate" with local resources, software, and systems will be circumscribed. In an attempt at nonpartisanship, ARTstor is placing limits on the individual's ability to download its images for use in other software environments and on the participating institution's ability to integrate these images into local software and systems. Many content owners and providers have gradually come to trust ARTstor to enable and manage the judicious educational use of their collections, but this trust does not - at this early stage - seem to be transferable at large. To enable the active use of ARTstor "content" outside its software environment would jeopardize its ability to develop the kinds of collections it has been able to offer. That said, we are pursuing a variety of promising approaches to interoperability. These include enabling "metasearching" across our collections in tandem with other online resources and the ability to use other resources within the ARTstor software environment. Users may already easily integrate local images into ARTstor's offline presentation tools, and shortly they will be able to do the same online. We are also conducting an "institutional hosting" pilot project involving a dozen facilities. We hope to offer a service through which we will host already-digitized image collections on ARTstor servers, so institutions can use their own digital collections alongside ours in a seamless way that also promises to relieve the burden on libraries to offer software tools for teaching and learning with images. The effort to understand and equalize the sometimes conflicting interests of a range of stakeholders is perhaps most challenging in the international arena; the international intellectual property and copyright landscape is singularly complicated and can vary significantly from country to country. The educational "fair use" exceptions to copyright that exist in U.S. copyright law do not exist in most countries. Similarly, cultural heritage and patrimony attitudes and laws vary markedly around the world. It is no small task to address these complexities on an international scale, and here, too, the effort is likely to require compromises on all sides.Campuswide collections
ARTstor also faces considerable obstacles on the collection development front. We are building a digital library that already holds approximately 300,000 images. The ARTstor "Charter Collection" will, by the end of 2006, include half a million images. But numbers tell only part of the story. Our key collection development goal is to build the kind of "campuswide" image library Professor Smith requires. There is a core body of visual cultural heritage materials that is of profound interest all across the arts, humanities, and beyond. ARTstor does not seek to build, say, an "art history collection," a "classics collection," and a "social sciences collection." Rather, we seek out coherent and cohesive image archives that will have wide relevance and value for these areas and beyond. In this respect, ARTstor's name may be misleading. We are committed to promoting the image needs of art historians, architectural historians, and practitioners of art and architecture, but ARTstor is equally committed to identifying the intersections and points of convergence that define the academic and scholarly landscape and to building image collections that have profound cross-disciplinary value. Achieving this goal is as challenging as it is compelling. A model of this kind of collection is "The Illustrated Bartsch." Based on a 100-volume reference work of the same name, it offers no fewer than 55,000 images of European prints from the 15th to the 19th century, drawing upon the print collections of scores of archives, libraries, and museums around the world. This is a collection that - presented online in a searchable database format - provides unique access to a body of visual materials that will be of enormous value to art scholars as well as all students of early modern European history and indeed to all parties interested in Western visual culture. ARTstor's focus on assembling and integrating heterogeneous image archives creates a range of mundane but no less pressing issues. Foremost among these, perhaps, is the need to manage and massage the data associated with these collections in such a way that the end user might search and browse intelligently. In its effort to address this, ARTstor and its metadata team have benefited particularly from the Getty Research Institute (a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles), which has made both its essential controlled vocabulary resources (the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and Union List of Artist Names) and the expertise of its staff readily available to us.More than read only
On the software front, ARTstor staff concluded early on that it would be essential to develop new software. This choice reflects our strong commitment to offering software tools that, like our collections, will respond first and foremost to our users. They need a software environment that, while web-based, is more than merely "read only." Those who work with visual materials must "drag and drop" images around the screen, select and store groups of images to which they wish to return later, share images with students and colleagues, present images dynamically in the classroom - online and, when a safety net is desired, offline as well. Only by controlling its own software fate can ARTstor respond with agility to the evolving needs of its users. The decision to "bundle" content and software has proven controversial. While many institutions place great value on having a "sole source" answer to both sets of needs, others (especially research universities that are committed to developing institutional digital library repositories and services) would sometimes prefer to host and manage ARTstor content in their own local software environment.A new space
This leads us to ARTstor's effort to create a secure, trusted space on the Internet for the educational, noncommercial use of digital images. As indicated, this space is defined by a licensing framework that embraces - and harmonizes the concerns and interests of - content owners, participating institutions, and end users. ARTstor pursues this goal by focusing its outreach efforts exclusively on the large community of nonprofits. ARTstor is presently available for participation by U.S. and Canadian nonprofits: schools, colleges, universities, museums, and other institutions dedicated to education, research, scholarship, culture, and the arts. This poses its own difficulties. Independent scholars, for example, play a significant role in the arts and humanities and are too often deprived of access to licensed information resources. We currently seek to address their needs by helping "walk-in" users where participating libraries themselves accommodate them. We are also interested in following in JSTOR's footsteps by exploring other avenues that lead to the same goal, e.g., by making ARTstor available via individual membership in scholarly organizations or through public libraries. As faculty from economics to engineering and from English to ethnology start to use images in their classrooms and studies, the challenges will become even more acute. We hope that ARTstor's efforts will help the community begin to address the roadblocks encountered by the Professor Smiths of the world.By Mirela Roncevic ARTstor subscribers don't always agree on what its strengths are or what enhancements can make it better meet their needs. More often than not, however, they share the same enthusiasm for its capabilities and see enormous potential. "Our students and staff are thrilled by it," says Jennifer Strickland, fine arts librarian at Ithaca College, NY, a subscriber since September 2004. Ithaca uses the database both as a research tool for students and as a teaching tool for faculty. Strickland praises ARTstor's flexibility, especially its remote access features and functionality. "The 'zoom in' function is incredible," she says. "You can view the images offline the way you were once only able to do online, and the quality is remarkable." Indeed, the database now allows for zooming so detailed that users can often see such imperfections as strands of hair. Donald Juedes, resource services librarian for art history at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, a subscriber since August 2004, agrees but finds ARTstor's rich content to be its strongest attribute. "They have done an exceptional job developing the charter collections to be useful, inclusive, and diverse," he says. "The search mechanism is robust for both keyword and advanced searching." Sarah Berman, curatorial coordinator at Seattle Art Museum (SAM), a subscriber since March 2005, says that the images' unparalleled quality justified SAM's subscription. "You may not always be able to find as wide a variety of art as you do when searching the entire web, but you get exceptional quality on the works you do find," she explains. ARTstor is swiftly replacing slides as the first choice for most curators' presentations at the museum.
Room to grow
Most users readily praise ARTstor's accessibility, but they add that its user-friendliness can depend on the individual. The more one knows about art, it appears, the more fruitful ARTstor is. "It gets more challenging to browse through results if the search is very specific," says Ithaca's Strickland. "It helps a great deal to be a savvy searcher," agrees Berman. "To be fair, we have only used the very basic functions and plan to take full advantage of ARTstor's free training." At Johns Hopkins and other larger institutions the greatest challenge may be interoperability with other presentation and content management systems. "ARTstor has wonderful capabilities internal to the product," says Juedes. "For institutions that have existing systems, it is impossible to export projection-quality images into secure local presentation packages. Therefore, use of ARTstor is limited to individuals who do not use other systems." Karen Wikoff, electronic resources librarian at Ithaca, understands such limitations. "ARTstor is stuck between us librarians, who want whatever we can get, and the people with whom they negotiate to get these collections," she says. "Initially, there were many restrictions, but things are changing for the better."What lies ahead
Since its launch a year ago, ARTstor has responded to users' complaints. Changes include giving users more flexibility offline and upgrading lesser quality images. But librarians have already pinpointed more gaps, such as limited coverage of modern and contemporary art. "When some faculty members see the lack of modern art, they choose not to use ARTStor at all," says Brooke Cox, visual resources librarian at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, a subscriber since October 2004. "As they invest their time in finding images on the web, it may be difficult to bring them back to ARTStor." Librarians also want to see ARTstor expand into such areas as anthropology and theater. These advancements are already taking place at DePauw, where ARTstor is hosting two local image collections, one on Asian art and the other from the university archives. DePauw is also in the midst of creating a science image collection that will include geology and botany. "At this point, the science collection will be part of our local image database, but we hope to add it to ARTstor in the future," explains Cox. Top of the list for large institutions: pricing. While subscribers embrace the stable rates as the product evolves, they call them "fair" for community colleges and small art schools and "exorbitant" for larger institutions. According to Johns Hopkins's Juedes, "Until the lack of interoperability with other systems is dealt with, it will be very difficult to justify the expense." Mirela Roncevic is Reference Editor, LJ Book ReviewWe are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing
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