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Participants in next week's DLF Forum will have an opportunity to talk
to James Shulman, ARTStor's Executive Director, in a "Birds of a
Feather" session.

David

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 13, 2004

CONTACT:   Hilary Dunst, 212.316.3279

ARTSTOR ANNOUNCES AVAILABILITY OF DIGITAL IMAGE RESOURCE

Initiative Sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 

to Serve Educational and Cultural Communities

ARTstor, a non-profit initiative founded by The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, today announced the availability of its Digital Library to
non-profit educational and cultural institutions in the U.S. starting
this summer.  

The ARTstor Digital Library is comprised of digital images and related
data; the tools to make active use of those images; and an online
environment intended to balance the interests of users with those of
content providers. ARTstor's "Charter Collection" will contain
approximately 300,000 digital images of visual material from different
cultures and disciplines, and seeks to offer sufficient breadth and
depth to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and
scholarly activities.  The Charter Collection is anticipated to grow to
half a million images by the summer of 2006.

ARTstor was established with a mission to use digital technology to
enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated
fields.  James Shulman, the executive director of ARTstor, noted that
"The impact of digitization on teaching and scholarship becomes
increasingly clear every day.  ARTstor is working with museums,
colleges, universities, libraries, archives and others around the world
in an effort to ensure that these dramatic changes happen in thoughtful
ways.  We are excited by the chance to play a role in a community-wide
effort to provide access to a growing collection of images representing
many aspects of the world's collective cultural heritage."

According to Neil L. Rudenstine, ARTstor's chairman and president
emeritus of Harvard University, "The growing need for an accessible
source of digital images has become a significant problem at many
educational institutions that are using limited resources to build and
sustain their own image archives.  ARTstor hopes to help address this
need by working with institutions to build a digital collection capable
of both system-wide growth and expansion at individual institutions, so
that participants will have significantly more material for educational
and scholarly uses."  

The Charter Collection is meant to serve as a campus-wide resource that
is focused on, but not limited to, the arts.  It documents artistic and
historical traditions across many time-periods and cultures and has been
derived from several source collections that are themselves the product
of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic archives,
publishers, slide libraries, and individual scholars.  Source
collections include: 

The Image Gallery: A collection of 200,000 images of world art and
culture corresponding to the contents of a university slide library,
constructed in response to college teaching needs.  Since the images
have been cataloged with subject headings, they will be useful both to
those in the arts and in many other fields;

The Carnegie Arts of the United States:  A widely used collection of
images documenting aspects of the history of American art, architecture,
visual and material culture;

The Huntington Archive of Asian Art:  A broad photographic overview of
the art of Asia from 3000 B.C. through the present;

The Illustrated Bartsch:  A collection derived from the art reference
publication of the same name, containing images and data related to more
than 50,000 old master European prints from the 15th to 19th Centuries;

The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive:  High resolution images of
wall paintings and sculpture from the Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang,
China, along with related objects and art from the caves that are now in
museums and libraries in Europe and the United States; and

The MoMA Architecture and Design Collection:  A comprehensive collection
of high resolution images representing the holdings of the Department of
Architecture and Design of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

ARTstor has developed software tools that will allow users at
participating institutions to use its Charter Collection without the
need for any other software.  Users will be able to view and analyze
images through features such as zooming and panning.  They will be able
to save groups of images for personal or group uses, as well as for use
in lectures and other presentation, either online or off-line.  

Participation fees for ARTstor's Charter Collection are listed now at
www.artstor.org.  Thirty-five test institutions have had access to the
software and image repository during the past academic year, including:
the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, Hunter College, James
Madison University, Johns Hopkins University, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the National Gallery of Art, New York University, Pennsylvania
State University, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, Smith
College, University of California at San Diego, Williams College and the
Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute.  

As William G. Bowen, the president of the Mellon Foundation, noted: "The
fit between new technology and visual images is an unusually promising
one. The ability to combine * and make active use of * images, data,
texts and other materials offers the opportunity to bring about a
substantial and exciting transformation in art-related teaching,
learning, and research." 

For more information about ARTstor, or about participating in ARTstor,
please visit: www.artstor.org <http://www.artstor.org/> .