THE GROWING NEED FOR AGGREGATE DIGITAL COLLECTIONS:

As teachers, scholars, and students in disciplines well beyond the arts attempt new approaches to teaching and learning—approaches that require the integration of visual materials into their curricula and research—they are encountering organizational and financial barriers. Traditional approaches to the development, management, and delivery of institutional collections and services cannot support the evolving and expanding need for images.

Visual resources departments at many institutions are striving to take advantage of the promise of digital technologies to solve this organizational conundrum. In the process, they often discover that not everything desirable is doable.

This discovery takes many forms, as challenges emerge on all sides. These include:

• daunting obstacles on the copyright and intellectual property front

• serious handicaps on the intellectual access, cataloging, and metadata fronts

• staggering infrastructure costs on the technology front

• profound challenges when it comes to developing scalable and sustainable user services and support.

In the face of these roadblocks, many institutions of higher education have begun to reexamine and rethink traditional approaches to building image collections and to test new ways of bolstering an expanding range of image users.

New partnerships among libraries, instructional technology units, and visual resources collections are being explored; conventional organizational boundaries are beginning to blur and shift.

A role is being envisioned for a trusted third party whose place in this evolving ecosystem would be both to foster cross-institutional collaboration and help alleviate organizational redundancies in order to contain system wide costs. Campuses are independently trying to digitize and catalog the same visual materials and then investing—again, redundantly—in managing these newly created digital assets, developing or licensing often expensive software in order to facilitate their use. Eventually they are discovering that the cost of all this is prohibitive for individual institutions and, in the aggregate, wasteful of the larger community's resources.

CHALLENGES FOR THE AGGREGATE COLLECTORS:

The greatest challenges is to balance the concerns, interests, and needs of content owners (archives, libraries, and, especially, museums, both here and abroad) and those of potential users of digital content, predominantly in higher education.

1) The needs of teachers, museum curators and other scholars are often different from those of other viewers. The kinds of things that are useful commercially may not necessarily be the things useful in the classroom.

(Just witness the differences between images on artstor.com versus those on artstor.org)

2) Most museums, as well as many other institutions that collect and preserve cultural objects, depend on revenues generated through commercial reproduction of their collections, whether on T-shirts and coffee mugs or in scholarly articles and books. Conversely, the purely noncommercial, educational use of images of museum objects in teaching and learning has never been a source of significant revenue; the majority of museums do not even actively make their collections available for these kinds of efforts. Only by understanding and underscoring this important distinction can the ground be cleared for developing a shared, mission-driven commitment to strengthening the educational use of digital images.

BENEFITS FOR THE USERS OF AGGREGATE COLLECTORS:

1) Scholars need a classification system that is coherent. Collectors are working to achieve this.

2) The can often provide an efficient way of sharing information on a collection when tight budgets prevent the production of expensive printed catalogs. Museums can spread the word about their holdings.

3) When permission is needed from copyright holders to reproduce images, an aggregator can negotiate better group rates from art-licensing organizations than a single museum might.

4) By limiting access to educational subscribers, museums can theoretically control how widely their treasures are dispersed across the Internet.