RESOUR> ARTstor's mission is to use digital technology to enhance scholarship

From: Gleason Sackmann <gleason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: NetHappenings <nethappenings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 08:22:24 -0600
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Net Happenings - From Educational CyberPlayGround
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ARTstor's mission is to use digital technology to enhance scholarship,
teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. Please visit the
collections Website at <http://www.artstor.org/collections/brief.shtml>
Best regards.-Arun

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 16:37:06 -0500
From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Multiple recipients of list <ninch-announce@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: ARTstor: The Web Site

NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources from
across the Community February 5, 2003

            ARTstor: http://www.artstor.org

Although many of us have known about it for a while, ARTstor now has a web
presence. Below I reproduce the welcome message from the chairman, Neil
Rudenstine, and the executive director, James Shulman.  Still building and
testing its collections, ARTstor will not be available until the 2003-2004
academic year. However, it is good to have a place where one can learn
about the progress of this important new resource.

David Green
===========

Welcome to ARTstor, an initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

ARTstor's purpose is to create a large - and indefinitely growing -
database of digital images and accompanying scholarly information for use
in art history and other humanistic fields of learning, including the
related social sciences.

ARTstor will be a not-for-profit organization, and its materials will only
be made available for use by not-for-profit educational institutions, such
as colleges and universities, museums, libraries, research institutes and
similar organizations. The goal is to enhance teaching, scholarship and
learning in fields of knowledge that use images and associated scholarly
materials for study and research, as well as in lectures, classrooms,
conferences and similar settings.

ARTstor's objective in creating its database is to carefully select
"collections" that are intrinsically significant, and that have sufficient
breadth, depth and coherence to make them genuinely useful to faculty,
curators, students and others.

Over time, ARTstor hopes to build - in collaboration with other
institutions - a database that will consist of millions of images and
related data. It will include collections from a wide variety of
civilizations, time-periods, and media, as well as from different sources,
such as museums, archaeological sites, photo-archives, slide collections,
and published materials that promise to be unusually helpful as scholarly
tools. Users will be able to search across an individual "collection" in
the database or across multiple collections, as a single large "library"
of materials.

Participation in ARTstor will be through institutional site licenses.
Fees will be set according to a sliding-scale based on a number of
institutional characteristics. The object is to make participation as
broad as possible across a great range of educational institutions, while
generating some revenue to offset a share of ARTstor's considerable
operating costs. The ARTstor database will be able to be accessed directly
by any individual who is an authenticated member of a participating
institution. Users will gain access to the collections by two routes: (1)
through this website, which will add functionality for searching,
browsing, saving, and presenting on a regular basis and (2) through
Insight (a product of Luna Imaging, Inc.). Over time, we will also work to
create bridges that will allow institutions that prefer to use software of
their own to work with content in the ARTstor database.

ARTstor began as an organization in the early fall of 2001. During the
past eighteen months, it has been creating its initial digital
collections, addressing technology issues, consulting with members of the
museum and academic communities, and preparing for the time - during the
academic year 2003-2004 - when materials could be made available for use
at educational institutions.

While we hope that these initial collections will be useful from the very
start, we also want to underscore a number of important points:

First, even the initial collections will not be complete at the time of
release, simply because the process of creating a coherent group of images
and data is highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. The entire process
- from choosing a project; reaching institutional collaborative
agreements; undertaking photography (or digitizing already-existing
images); updating catalog information; and guiding the entire production
process carefully to ensure quality-control - is complex as well as
costly, and it simply cannot be rushed.  Consequently, the content and
size of the initial database will inevitably be illustrative of what can
be achieved over time as new material is added. We hope that, within the
next eighteen months, we will have something in the range of 400,000
images and data online.  But even that - measured against the infinite
universe of art-objects - is obviously only the barest of beginnings.

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A learning site that celebrates diversity in students' background
while highlighting the variety in students' preferred approaches
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Second, while ARTstor can do a considerable amount in creating an
inter-institutional network, as well as building online collections, it is
clear that no single organization can possibly do more than a small
fraction of what needs to be accomplished if the national and
international community of educational institutions is to be well-served.
The hope, therefore, is that the ARTstor database and network can soon
begin to function as a public utility that would eventually become a very
broad-based co-operative enterprise, with participating institutions
contributing digital materials while simultaneously benefiting from the
growing database. ARTstor will exercise responsibility for maintaining -
and adding significantly to - this database, just as it will maintain the
complex systems (and staff) essential to this initiative. But we fully
expect that there will come a time when the not-for-profit educational
community of museums, colleges, universities and others will essentially
"own" and operate the system.

Third, while ARTstor considers its primary purpose to be the creation and
provision of digital images and related materials for scholarly and
instructional use, it also hopes to do more than "deliver a product." In
fact, because so little is known about the most effective ways to build
and use digital collections of this kind, we will need advice, criticism,
suggestions - and even some patience! - from participating institutions,
so that we can all learn together about users needs, software adaptations,
image quality standards, metadata standards, and collection-building. As
with any new technology, we expect that any number of mistakes will
inevitably be made along the way, and that only a community-wide effort -
sharing expertise, experience, and new ideas - can lead to genuinely
useful and enriching results.

In the meanwhile, please read and ponder, and check back as we update the
site over the coming months.

With best regards -
Neil Rudenstine and James Shulman
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RESOUR> ARTstor's mission is to use digital technology to enhance scholarship

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