ARTstor is a non-profit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences. The ARTstor Digital Library also includes a set of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching purposes. There are currently more than 1,300 ARTstor institutional subscribers in over 42 countries.[1], including colleges and universities, museums, libraries, primary and secondary schools, and other non-profit organizations.
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ARTstor Digital Library launched as a live service in July 2004, having been created in 2001 with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since 2003, the organization has been an independent non-profit 501(C)(3) organization based in New York, and operates under the leadership of President James Shulman, in collaboration with Neil Rudenstine (Chairman) and the ARTstor Board of Trustees.[2]
In the late 1990s, as universities and libraries began to convert their slide libraries into local digital image databases, ARTstor was created to address the growing need for a shared online image library that would be accessible to educational institutions worldwide. The ARTstor Digital Library is intended to reduce redundant efforts of scanning and cataloging thousands of the same images from multiple repositories, and also to enable new digital image collections to be shared for teaching and research. The initiative paired innovative digital image and online technologies with Mellon Foundation’s ongoing mission to support higher education, museums, the arts, and art conservation to “bring about a substantial transformation in art-related teaching, learning, and research.”[3]
ARTstor's primary goals as an organization are: to assemble image collections from across many time periods and cultures; to create an organized, central, and reliable digital resource that supports strictly non-commercial use of images for research, teaching and learning; and to work with the arts and educational communities to develop collective solutions for building, managing and sharing digital images for educational use. Like many non-profits, ARTstor has a mixed business model; some services are provided on a fee basis (geared toward the size of the subscribing institution) and others are provided free of charge to the community.
The ARTstor Digital Library offers a wide range of images needed for interdisciplinary teaching and research, including contributions from the leading museums, photo archives, libraries, scholars, photographers, artists, and artists’ estates. These diverse collections include: Magnum Photos, Carnegie Arts of the United States, The Illustrated Bartsch, the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, The Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Architecture and Design Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bodleian Library, and more.[4]
The Digital Library comprises more than one million images from hundreds of collections worldwide. The Digital Library is continually expanded by new contributions such as: Mark Rothko Estate; Latin American Art (Cisneros Collection); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Christopher Roy: African Art and Architecture; Berlin State Museums; the Gernsheim Corpus of Master Drawings (185,000 images of old master drawings); Larry Qualls Archive (100,000 images documenting 30 years of NYC gallery exhibitions); architectural photography from Esto, Canyonlights and ART on FILE; university collections from Harvard and Yale; and historical photo archives such as the National Gallery of Art and Frick Art Reference Library, among many others.
ARTstor’s collections are useful for learning and research within the arts, as well as in other disciplines. For example, in February 2009 the ARTstor and Magnum Photos collaboration added 80,000 contemporary photographs of iconic world events and people by world-renowned documentary photographers. ARTstor serves as a valuable resource for students and teachers in disciplines including African-American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, History, Medieval Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Music History, Native American Studies, Religious Studies, Renaissance Studies, and Women’s Studies.[5]
Material is available to download to participating nonprofit institutions[6]. ARTStor requires a non-exclusive license for material submitted to ARTStor. This allows the copyright owner to retain rights to distribute images through other media. The high-resolution versions of the images are encrypted using FlashPix, allowing download and printing only of relatively low-resolution images (1024 pixels along the maximum dimension). ARTStor requires that contributions be made available on a perpetual basis.
Apart from free 30-day trials and online demonstrations [7], access to the ARTStor material requires a subscription [8].
ARTstor users have the ability to search, organize, present, upload, and share images. In addition to keyword and advanced searching, users may browse works by geography, classification, or collection name. Users can zoom in on high-resolution images in the image viewer and review related information in image data records.They can also export images for use in classroom presentations and other non-commercial, educational uses, either as JPEGs, or presentations for PowerPoint 2007. ARTstor has also developed the Offline Image Viewer (OIV), an alternative tool for giving offline classroom presentations. OIV allows users to download much larger images from ARTstor, combine ARTstor images with their own content to create digital slide show presentations that feature side-by-side comparisons, zooming and panning, and the ability to customize text on the slides. OIV enables instructors to give reliable classroom presentations using both high-resolution ARTstor images and local content without being connected to the Internet.[9] The ARTstor Digital Library is accessible through Apple iPad, iPhone, and the iPod Touch, providing read-only features such as searching and browsing, zooming, and viewing saved image groups.[10]
ARTstor has launched the initial version of Shared Shelf[11], an image management software service for institutions to manage, actively use, and, optionally, share their institutional and faculty image collections. This Web-based, enterprise-level service includes a controlled vocabulary warehouse as well as tools for cataloging, digital asset management, and publishing to the Web. It will also enable seamless integration of image collections with the ARTstor Digital Library content and interface. Shared Shelf is being developed in collaboration with nine partner institutions to further expand support for shared vocabularies and other features, and will be available to institutions early 2012.
Both ARTstor Digital Library and Shared Shelf were established to serve the nonprofit mission of using digital technologies to further education, scholarship, and research worldwide.