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ArtSTORMax Marmor aa Collection Development for ArtSTOR, The AndrewJ. Mellon Foundation , New York, NY, USAPublished online: 22 Sep 2008.

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ArtSTOR:A Digital Library for the History of Art

Max Marmor

SUMMARY. ArtSTOR is a digital imaging initiative of The Andrew W.Mellon Foundation. ArtSTOR seeks to create digital image collections thatrespond to the needs of scholars, curators, teachers and students in the his-tory of art and related fields of study. As a public utility, it also aims to createa secure, regulated, networked space, defined by a framework of licensingagreements that embraces content providers, subscribers, and service ad-ministrators–a precinct in which educational and scholarly activities canflourish in ways that simultaneously respect intellectual property rights andencourage the “fair use” of digital media. [Article copies available for a feefrom The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>.]

KEYWORDS. ArtSTOR, Mellon Foundation, digital image collections,digital media, digital image libraries

ArtSTOR is a digital initiative launched in April 2001 by The AndrewW. Mellon Foundation (http://www.mellon.org/artstor%20announcement.

Max Marmor is Director of Collection Development for ArtSTOR, The Andrew J.Mellon Foundation, New York, NY (E-mail: mcm@mellon.org).

This article was first published in Art Libraries Journal 27/3 (2002): 26-29. © byARLIS/UK & Ireland. The author is grateful to Gillian Varley, editor, for permission tore-use the text of that publication here.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “ArtSTOR: A Digital Library for the History of Art.” Marmor, Max.Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Library Administration (The Haworth Information Press, an im-print of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 39, No. 2/3, 2003, pp. 61-68; and: Digital Images and Art Libraries inthe Twenty-First Century (ed: Susan Wyngaard) The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The HaworthPress, Inc., 2003, pp. 61-68. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The HaworthDocument Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].

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html). The Foundation is a non-profit philanthropic institution, primarilydedicated to supporting education and the arts; its two primary constituen-cies are institutions of higher education and cultural institutions. By virtueof its long-standing commitment to these two sectors–a commitment thatreflects the charitable interests of the Mellon family–the Foundation seemsespecially well-suited to identify and advance shared interests in the cre-ation and use of digital resources in the arts.

ArtSTOR’s name is intended to allude to the project’s principal do-main–the arts–as well as its kinship with JSTOR, with which most read-ers of this publication will be familiar (see http://www.jstor.org). LikeJSTOR, which creates, “stores” and distributes digital versions of thecomplete backfiles of core journals in the humanities, sciences, and so-cial sciences, ArtSTOR will create (or aggregate), “store” and distributedigital images of visual materials. Again like JSTOR, ArtSTOR seeks,in performing these services, to advance and progressively transformthe ways in which scholarship, teaching, and learning are conducted.The audience of both initiatives is strictly non-commercial and educa-tional and, like JSTOR, ArtSTOR anticipates functioning as an inde-pendent, non-profit–and mission-driven–organization. ArtSTOR is adescendant of JSTOR in another key respect: its roots go back toJSTOR’s first exploration into the technical and legal issues posed bydigitizing core art history journals, an exploration bearing fruit now asJSTOR assembles its art history collection, which will include, amongother titles, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, and Journal of the War-burg and Courtauld Institutes.

ArtSTOR is being launched at a significant moment in the develop-ment of digital image libraries. Recent years have seen the emergenceof such ambitious imaging initiatives as the Visual Arts Data Service,the Museum Educational Site Licensing project, the Art Museum ImageConsortium (AMICO) and the Research Libraries Group’s CulturalMaterials Initiative. At the same time, the Digital Library Federation(http://www.diglib.org), a membership organization under the umbrellaof the Council on Library and Information Resources (http://www.clir.org), has devoted significant effort and resources to advancing thedevelopment of user-centered digital libraries. In the domain withwhich ArtSTOR is concerned, the DLF’s experimental Academic Im-age Cooperative (http://www.diglib.org/collections/aic.htm) has doneespecially instructive and valuable work. An attempt to model the de-velopment of sustainable, user-centered digital libraries of art images,the AIC has contributed substantially to the development of ArtSTOR.

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While directly supporting work on the Academic Image Cooperativeand funding an important study of the Museum Educational Site Li-censing project, the Mellon Foundation was simultaneously engaged asa funding agency with a range of digital projects. It has supported andattended closely to an exemplary project to digitize the Museum ofModern Art’s rich, but only partially accessible, design collection. Thisproject provided an instructive opportunity to assess the value and thecost of digitizing museum collections at high resolution, the variety ofproduction strategies available for doing so, ranging from direct digitalcapture to scanning photographic intermediary media, the opportunitiesand challenges posed by rich museum metadata, and the complex andvariable needs of potential end users. The project has also offered a sus-tained opportunity to enhance our understanding of the software toolsscholars most need in order to work effectively with digital images ofcultural materials. Luna Imaging, Inc. (http://www.luna-imaging.com)managed the MoMA project, and Luna’s Insight® software was em-ployed for the manipulation, storage and presentation of the digital im-ages. Luna is now playing a similarly collaborative role in ArtSTOR’sdevelopment.

Simultaneously, the Foundation was supporting an important inter-national effort, led by a team of scholars at Northwestern University, todigitize–progressively and over many years–the treasure trove of cul-tural materials associated with the hundreds of Buddhist cave shrines atthe Dunhuang oasis site, a key node for ten centuries on the culturalcrossroads of the Silk Route, in the Gobi Desert. In the first instance,high-resolution digital versions of the interior decoration of the caveshrines are being created, offering visual access to wall paintings andsculptures, many of which are extremely difficult to see even in situ.These rich forms of digital documentation are being “stitched” togetherto create digital re-creations of the interiors, to be presented (initially atleast) via Quick Time Virtual Reality technology, now integrated as acomponent within the Insight® software environment. The Founda-tion’s Mellon International Dunhuang Archive will unite these imagesfrom the caves with a range of other materials–sacred and secular texts,textiles, etc.–formerly located at Dunhuang but removed from the site atthe beginning of the 20th century and now preserved in the collectionsof an international group of archives, libraries, and museums, amongthem the British Library, British Museum, the Musée Guimet and theBibliothèque Nationale. ArtSTOR staff are keenly interested in ways ofemploying rich media in support of the study of monuments to whichstill images cannot do full justice.

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THE ArtSTOR COLLECTIONS SPECTRUM

The MoMA Digital Design Collection and the Dunhuang projectsmay now be regarded as defining one end of the initial ArtSTOR collec-tions spectrum: specialized digital collections derived, frequently viadirect digital capture, from primary sources, whether found at remotearcheological sites or in archives, libraries and museums. In addition tobeing based on primary sources, these collections have several featuresin common: they will primarily support the scholarship and teaching ofa relatively circumscribed but important international audience of sub-ject specialists; they embody a rare opportunity to measure the impactof digital image technologies on advanced scholarship and to test newforms of scholarly communication; they feature rich, complex, disci-pline-based metadata posing significant challenges from a standardsperspective; their users will have occasion to take full advantage of therich functionality of the Insight® software environment; and, they areexpensive to produce and to replicate.

At the other pole of the ArtSTOR collections spectrum will be abroad “image gallery.” Drawing on multiple sources, this image galleryis meant to be the digital equivalent of a large academic slide libraryand, like the latter, it should support both a wide range of teaching needsand also research and scholarship. It will offer a broad compendium ofimages, perhaps 300,000-500,000 images in the relatively near term,crafted around common, undergraduate-level teaching needs in art his-tory and related disciplines.

Initially, the ArtSTOR image gallery will draw substantially upon adigital version of the slide library of a single university, that of the Uni-versity of California at San Diego, a collection which, uniquely, com-bined four essential features: scale (250,000 slides), contours definedby standard art history and humanities curricula, professionally pro-duced 35mm photography in uniformly good physical condition, andstandardized, online cataloging data for the entire collection. A supple-mentary source of the image gallery is the collection of more than 4,500core images of American art and architecture originally assembled forthe much-admired Carnegie Study of the Arts of the United States in theearly 1960s. That canonic collection has now been digitized from theoriginal, archival set of 4″ × 5″ color negatives, and the catalog data pro-duced in conjunction with the original Carnegie project has been retro-spectively converted and enhanced jointly by the University of GeorgiaLibrary, which owns the collection, and the Yale University Library. A

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second supplementary source of the image gallery will be the approxi-mately 4,000 images assembled by the Digital Library Federation insupport of the Academic Image Cooperative project–a collection de-fined on the basis of an overlap concordance of ten of the standard arthistory survey texts, and thus offering support for widely-taught,heavily-subscribed introductory courses in the history of art.

This image gallery aspires to do several things. Being shaped aroundcommon curricula, it should relieve many colleges, universities, and indi-viduals of the need to digitize their own slide collections in support of theessential image needs of art history teachers. This activity is performedredundantly in the U.S. and abroad, consumes notoriously limited re-sources, and is typically conducted in such a manner that shared learningis precluded by the erection of firewalls around institutional collections.One of the Mellon Foundation’s basic goals is to alleviate such unproduc-tive redundancies, and that goal will be strongly advanced by the widedistribution of the ArtSTOR image gallery. ArtSTOR is working closelywith the Visual Resources Association in this arena; VRA and its mem-bership are actively engaged with assessing the likely impact of digitaltechnologies and of licensing models on professional practice, profes-sional training and development, and the ongoing operations of VR col-lections.

At the same time, the image gallery is intended to be of real value to awide range of individuals and institutions, from students and teachers in(perhaps) secondary as well as post-secondary schools that have no sig-nificant slide resources, let alone digital collections, to research univer-sities and museums with rich institutional image collections. It shouldsignificantly support teaching needs all across this terrain, including theclassroom presentation of digital images, the provision of course-based“image reserves,” the educational outreach programs of museums and,potentially, remedial, lifelong learning, and distance education pro-grams. The Insight® software is capable of supporting all such educa-tional applications.

At other points on the ArtSTOR collections spectrum, users will finda range of collections that promise to support both the research andteaching of specialists and the more general scholarly and teaching in-terests of art historians and other scholars in the humanities and socialsciences. Suffice to mention a few.

An Asian Art Survey collection will initially offer approximately10,000 images derived, in large part, from the important photographicarchive of John and Susan Huntington at Ohio State University, authori-ties in the field of Buddhist iconography and the art of the Indian sub-

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continent, and supplemented by resources from the American Councilfor South Asian Art at the University of Michigan. This collection is in-tended to support survey courses in the art of Asia as well as scholarshipin the art of India and Buddhist iconography.

The Digital Bartsch collection will offer approximately 50,000 imagesderived from Old Master European prints from the 15th to the 19th cen-tury. Based on the photographic archives underlying the monumental ref-erence work, The Illustrated Bartsch (TIB), this project will offer digitalversions of all the works reproduced, cataloged, and described in the 96volumes of TIB published to date, as well as related cataloging and inter-pretive data. The Foundation is also supporting the ongoing publicationof TIB, with provision for integration of new materials into ArtSTOR.

ArtSTOR’s efforts to provide for some of the basic imaging needs ofteachers and scholars in the history of art should not be seen as fully de-fining ArtSTOR’s collection development trajectory. ArtSTOR is ac-tively seeking to texture traditional art historical canons and to respondto evolving methodologies and pedagogies–in art history and through-out the humanities. In some instances, specific collections are alreadybeing created or secured to respond to these evolving interests. A casein point is a suite of collections that might be said to deal with “socialiconography,” and which document the roles and representation of vari-ous social groups.

These charter collections are intended to help ArtSTOR develop anongoing collection development strategy. Each represents a differentapproach to collection building, and together they represent collabora-tions with museums, slide libraries, publishers, faculty photographers,teams of scholars, and photo archives. Assessment of these models ofcollection building and the value of these collections to ArtSTOR’s var-ied audience will shape ArtSTOR’s ongoing development.

SERVICES

ArtSTOR aspires not merely to develop and distribute a rich digitalimage library, but also to develop and deploy a suite of services to the ed-ucational and museum communities. Some of these services have beensuggested above: enabling educational institutions to subscribe to digitalcollections and in so doing to limit their own need to invest in creatingand managing local digital collections; developing, in collaboration withLuna Imaging, a range of software tools that encourage the integration ofdigital images and digital technologies generally into teaching, learning,

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and scholarship in art history and related fields; creating opportunitiesand a suitable forum for the evolution of new forms of scholarly commu-nication. Other areas where experiments in service development are an-ticipated include software mechanisms enabling museum and visualresources professionals to take fullest advantage of, and also to assist in theenhancement of, ArtSTOR collection metadata; creation of a union catalogof art image metadata, a utility which, if successful, would be of significantvalue to visual resources professionals as well as scholars; and software en-abling the use of local digital collections, personal and institutional, along-side ArtSTOR collections. Special effort is being made to explore waysin which ArtSTOR can help museums achieve efficiencies and econo-mies, including economies of scale, comparable to those it promises tohelp colleges and universities secure.

Perhaps the greatest service ArtSTOR can–and hopes to–provide is thecreation of a secure, regulated, networked space, defined by a frameworkof licensing agreements that embraces content providers, subscribers,and service administrators; a precinct in which educational and scholarlyactivities can flourish in ways that simultaneously respect intellectualproperty rights and encourage the “fair use” of digital media, and enablethe creation and widespread use of increasingly authoritative, sustain-able, and scaleable digital image collections.

NEXT STEPS

ArtSTOR anticipates offering a subscription service to educational andother cultural institutions some time in the course of 2003. Meanwhile, aformative research process is now being initiated, beginning with a seriesof focus group meetings in the spring of 2002 to be followed by informaltesting at selected campuses and museums during the 2002/2003 academicyear. ArtSTOR’s charter collections, described briefly above, have beenidentified and created to advance the several goals of this testing process.The test period is being designed to help ArtSTOR:

• understand the opportunities, challenges, complexities, value andcost of working with museums, publishers, photographic archives,slide libraries and other potential sources of content

• gauge the nature, scale, and needs of ArtSTOR’s potential audi-ences, with respect to both collections and services, an assessmentinformed by various forms of “market research,” including focusgroups, surveys of users of ArtSTOR charter collections, etc.

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• elucidate the software needs of that potentially wide audience, interms of both functionality and usability

• assess the value of ArtSTOR’s charter collections and inform itsongoing collection development strategy

• understand the organizational issues educational and cultural insti-tutions might confront in engaging with a subscription-based digi-tal image library service

• understand the professional impact ArtSTOR might have on arthistorians, librarians, visual resources and museum professionals,and others in the cultural sector

• assess the role of ArtSTOR within the evolving digital market-place, as defined in terms of the educational and scholarly use ofdigital media.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, ArtSTOR seeks to develop a digital image library forthe history of art and the humanities, a digital library that, like our greatacademic and research libraries, is simultaneously a space in which ed-ucation and scholarship flourish, a rich repository supporting these ac-tivities, and a public utility that will attract and provide a permanenthome for valuable collections created by others who share ArtSTOR’seducational and scholarly mission.

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