ABOUT:

ARTstor is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in April 2001, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields.

The ARTstor Digital Library Charter Collection is:

• A repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data;

• The tools to actively use those images; and

• A restricted usage environment that seeks to balance the rights of content providers with the needs and interests of content users.

Ultimately, ARTstor was founded to contribute to the work of the arts and educational community. ARTstor's primary goals as an organization are:

• To assemble image collections from across many time periods and cultures that will, in the aggregate, have sufficient depth, breadth, and coherence to support a wide range of educational and scholarly activities;

• To create an organized, central, and reliable digital resource that supports noncommercial use of images for research, teaching and learning; and

• To work with the arts and educational communities to develop collective solutions to the complex challenges that are an inescapable part of working in a changing digital environment.

The ARTstor Charter Collection currently contains nearly 500,000 images. The Charter Collection documents artistic traditions across many times and cultures and embraces architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture. ARTstor hopes that the Charter Collection will, in its richness, scope and variety, support the needs of teachers and scholars throughout the arts and humanities.

"Our students and staff are thrilled by it," says Jennifer Strickland, fine arts librarian at Ithaca College, NY.. Ithaca uses the database both as a research tool for students and as a teaching tool for faculty. Strickland praises ARTstor's flexibility, especially its remote access features and functionality. "The 'zoom in' function is incredible," she says. "You can view the images offline the way you were once only able to do online, and the quality is remarkable." The database allows for zooming so detailed that users can often see such imperfections as strands of hair.

Donald Juedes, resource services librarian for art history at Johns Hopkins University, finds ARTstor's rich content to be its strongest attribute. "They have done an exceptional job developing the charter collections to be useful, inclusive, and diverse," he says. "The search mechanism is robust for both keyword and advanced searching."

Sarah Berman, curatorial coordinator at Seattle Art Museum (SAM), says that the images' unparalleled quality justified SAM's subscription. "You may not always be able to find as wide a variety of art as you do when searching the entire web, but you get exceptional quality on the works you do find," she explains. ARTstor is swiftly replacing slides as the first choice for most curators' presentations at the museum.

DESCRIPTIVE INFORMATION:

The textual descriptions that accompany each image in the ARTstor Digital Library—sometimes referred to as catalog records or descriptive metadata—are crucial to making the library work. These descriptive data records both make it possible to find images within ARTstor, and greatly enhance the usefulness of the images for teaching, learning and research by providing key contextual information.

The need to manage and massage the data associated with these collections in such a way that the end user might search and browse intelligently is very important. In its effort to address this, ARTstor and its metadata team have benefited particularly from the Getty Research Institute (a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles), which has made its essential controlled vocabulary resources (the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and Union List of Artist Names) available.

Challenges

ARTstor faces a number of challenges in its ongoing efforts to provide rich, useful and authoritative descriptive data. Some of these challenges are:

• The diversity of ARTstor's collections

ARTstor's collections are the result of partnerships with a wide variety of contributors, ranging from art museums to university slide libraries to academic publishers; the descriptive approaches employed by the contributors varies according to the needs of their respective audiences. ARTstor is seeking to integrate these heterogeneous descriptions in a meaningful way, allowing users to search and browse across the collections while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the original descriptions.

• The inherent complexity in documenting visual culture

Documentation about visual culture, and art history in particular, is inherently complex; this is partly because the cultural significance of creative works is intertwined with their historical contexts, and partly because there is often no "right" answer, but rather multiple (and sometimes contradictory!) viewpoints that comprise a scholarly debate.

• The diverse needs of ARTstor's users

The descriptive data needs of ARTstor's users are even more diverse than the collections; depending upon the task at hand, some users need only basic descriptive data to quickly locate images, whereas other users want the most comprehensive, detailed and authoritative documentation available.