Fifteen Art Museums to Share Collections

ARTstor announced today that fifteen art museums have committed to share digital image collections and associated data through ARTstor. Images and data from these collections will enhance ARTstor's ability to provide broad-based access to art images for educational and scholarly use in museums, colleges and universities, and the K-12 sector.

The contributing museums include:
The Art Institute of Chicago http://www.artic.edu/
The Cleveland Museum of Art http://www.clevelandart.org/
Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College http://www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu/ Dallas Museum of Art http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco http://www.thinker.org/
Harvard University Art Museums http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/
The Frick Collection http://www.frick.org/
Kimbell Art Museum http://www.kimbellart.org/
Los Angeles County Museum of Art http://www.lacma.org/
The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/
Philadelphia Museum of Art http://www.philamuseum.org/
Smithsonian American Art Museum http://www.americanart.si.edu/
Victoria and Albert Museum http://www.vam.ac.uk/
The Walters Art Museum http://www.thewalters.org/
Williams College Museum of Art http://www.wcma.org/
Yale University Art Gallery http://www.artgallery.yale.edu/

Many of these museums have been participants in AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium), the pioneering digital initiative originally created by the Association of Art Museum Directors. AMICO announced recently that it would cease operations in July 2005, and expressed its intention to work with ARTstor during a transition period to encourage member museums to continue their efforts in collaboration with ARTstor. In addition to these institutions that had previously contributed to AMICO, other major art museums that will make parts of their image collections available through ARTstor include the Kimbell Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Williams College Museum of Art.

These art museum partnerships will result in the sharing through ARTstor of tens of thousands of very high quality digital images - images carefully selected by museum curators representing both well-known masterpieces and thousands of works of art that deserve to be better known. Many of the hidden treasures of major art museums - such as the textiles, photographs, and works on paper that are typically too fragile to be on regular public view - will be available for study by scholars, curators, and students at the more than 300 colleges, universities, art schools and museums now participating in ARTstor. James Shulman, Executive Director of ARTstor, noted that, "We are delighted that ARTstor can serve as an avenue through which these
extraordinary institutions can make images of their works available for non-profit educational use. In addition to adding many thousands of images of the highest quality and museum-authorized cataloging data to the ARTstor Digital Library, these collaborations represent exciting steps in our effort to be a part of a community-wide effort. We look forward to continuing partnerships with colleagues and friends at these and other museums."