ARTstor Update: Collaborative Agreement Reached

Collaborative Agreement Reached Between the University of Michigan,
the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), and ARTstor

The University of Michigan, the American Council for Southern Asian
Art (ACSAA), and ARTstor Inc. announced today that they had reached an
agreement whereby the University of Michigan and ARTstor will
collaborate on the distribution through ARTstor of approximately
13,000 high quality digital images from the University of Michigan
slide distribution service’s “ACSAA Color Slide Project.” Spanning
nearly 3,000 years of Southern Asian culture, the ACSAA Color Slide
Project has been the primary source of teaching images in the field of
Southern Asian art and architecture for thirty years.

The ACSAA Color Slide Project is a non-profit supplier of photographic
materials of Southern Asian art. Since 1974, the Project has provided
high quality yet modestly priced color slides of the art and
architecture of India and other South and Southeast Asian countries
(Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia,
Pakistan, Afghanistan) to individuals and institutions for teaching
and research purposes around the world.

This collaboration will make this rich body of visual material and
related scholarship available online and at high resolution for the
first time. The audience for these materials will include not only art
historians but also scholars, teachers, and students throughout the
humanities and social sciences, who will value having the ability to
access, browse, and make rich educational and scholarly uses of this
unique corpus of images. Through this agreement, the University of
Michigan expects to make sets of the digital images available to
individual scholars, here and abroad, as it has always done with its
slide sets.

In reaching this agreement, Alex Potts, Professor and Chair of the
History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, and Mary Beth
Heston, President of ACSAA and Chair of the Art History Department at
the College of Charleston, expressed their enthusiasm in collaborating
with ARTstor and in using digital technologies to make this important
scholarly resource more broadly available for noncommercial
pedagogical and scholarly purposes. “The History of Art Department at
Michigan is very glad to be working with ARTstor in making a
significant portion of the exceptionally rich visual archive of Asian
material it administers more widely available to students and
researchers in the field. Collaborating with the American Council for
Southern Asian Art to bring the holdings of the ACSAA Color Slide
Project to a wider audience is important for the educational mission
of both our institutions,” said Professor Potts, expressing the
University of Michigan’s enthusiasm for this collaboration. “ACSAA
believes ARTstor shares the original educational and scholarly
objectives of ACSAA in assembling and distributing these images.
ARTstor will further our mission to provide an important resource for
scholars, teachers and students by bringing this resource into the
digital age,” Professor Heston adds on behalf of ACSAA. Max Marmor,
ARTstor’s Director of Collection Development, expressed ARTstor’s keen
interest in this partnership. “The ACSAA slides have been one of the
key sources of teaching images in Asian art and architecture for
decades. Making these very important images available to teachers and
scholars in digital form through ARTstor will significantly ease the
transition to digital for hosts of teachers and students, while also
adding a new dimension to the immensely important slide distribution
projects at the University of Michigan and strengthening ACSAA’s key
role in support of the study of Southern Asian Art.”

The ACSAA Color Slide Project is a not-for-profit service established
by the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) at the
University of Michigan in the mid-1970s. Since then the ACSAA Color
Slide Project has functioned as a service to the educational
community. The Project, which has benefited from the contributions of
many individual photographers, concentrates on photographing and
distributing, at an affordable price, slides of art objects from
exhibitions, distinguished private collections, and the permanent
collections of major American and South Asian museums. The project
also photographs and distributes slides of major architectural sites
that include sculptural monuments. For more information on the
Project, see its website at http://www.umich.edu/~hartspc/acsaa/acsaa.html.

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) is a non-profit
organization dedicated to advancing the study and awareness of the art
of South and Southeast Asia. In addition to periodic symposia, ACSAA
pursues these goals through various projects, including its bi-annual
newsletter, bibliographies, and of course the ACSAA Color Slide
Project. Since its incorporation in 1967, ACSAA has grown from its
original fifteen members to an organization of some three hundred
individuals and institutions. For more information on ACSAA see the
organizational website at http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/acsaa/hp.html.