ARTstor - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

ARTstor is a non-profit organization

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

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., including college

College

A college is an educational institution or a constituent part of an educational institution. Usage varies in English-speaking nations...

s and universities

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

, museum

Museum

A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...

s, libraries

Library

In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...

, primary and secondary school

School

A school is an institution designed for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is commonly compulsory. In these systems, students progress through a series of schools...

s, and other non-profit organizations.

History

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

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City and Princeton, New Jersey in the United States, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, endowed with wealth accumulated by the late Andrew W. Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969...

. 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

James Shulman

James Shulman is ARTstor's President. During his nine years at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation before joining ARTstor, he participated in the construction of large databases, wrote about educational policy issues and the missions of not-for-profit institutions, and worked in a range of research,...

, in collaboration with Neil Rudenstine (Chairman) and the ARTstor Board of Trustees.

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.”

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.

Collections

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

Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo...

, Carnegie Arts of the United States, The Illustrated Bartsch

Adam Bartsch

Johann Adam Bernhard von Bartsch was an Austrian scholar and artist. His catalogue of Old master prints is the foundation of the Art History of printmaking, and he was himself a printmaker in engraving and etching....

, the Mellon International Dunhuang

Dunhuang

Dunhuang is a city in northwestern Gansu province, Western China. It was a major stop on the ancient Silk Road. It was also known at times as Shāzhōu , or 'City of Sands', a name still used today...

Archive, The Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and The Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

(MoMA) Architecture and Design Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

, the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

, and more.

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

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

(SFMOMA); Christopher Roy: African Art and Architecture; Berlin State Museums

Berlin State Museums

The Berlin State Museums, in German Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, are a group of museums in Berlin, Germany overseen by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and funded by the German federal government in collaboration with Germany's federal states...

; 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

National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...

and Frick Art Reference Library

Frick Art Reference Library

The Frick Art Reference Library is a research institution affiliated with The Frick Collection. It is located at 10 East 71st Street in New York City...

, 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

Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo...

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.

Licensing

Material is available to download to participating nonprofit institutions. 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 , access to the ARTStor material requires a subscription .

Tools and features

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 JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

s, 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. 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.

Shared Shelf

ARTstor has launched the initial version of Shared Shelf, 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.

External links

http://www.artstor.org ARTstor Digital Library
http://www.artstor.org/what-is-artstor/w-html/collection-status.shtml ARTstor Collections: Description and Status
http://www.artstor.org/interested-in-participation/i-html/current-participants.shtml ARTstor Current Participants
http://www.artstor.org/interested-in-participation/i-html/becoming-participant.shtml Participation
http://www.artstor.org/using-artstor/u-html/support-and-training.shtml Support & Training