ARTstor Update: AMICO, ACSAA and ARTstor

JUNE 6, 2005

Content:

* ARTstor plans for AMICO Content

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

* Other News

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ARTstor plans for AMICO Content

Many of you are aware that as part of the agreement reached between
ARTstor and the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) in June 2004,
AMICO will be phasing out its independent operations as of July 2005.
AMICO is supporting ARTstor's role in providing broad based access to
what is expected to be the world's largest single collection of online
art images designed specifically for use by the education, research
and arts communities (http://www.artstor.org/info/news/AMICO.jsp).

Because the AMICO Library™, an image resource to which some ARTstor
participants still subscribe, will cease to exist in its current form
when the AMICO organization ceases operations, some ARTstor
participants have been inquiring as to the status of including The
AMICO Library™ content into the ARTstor Charter Collection.

In order for ARTstor to carry on AMICO’s efforts, we began the process
of reaching agreements with each of the 39 museum members of AMICO in
the fall of 2004. Twenty AMICO member museums have now expressed their
intention to share content through ARTstor on a non-exclusive basis.
Eighteenixteen of these museums have committed to contribute their
content and four museums are currently reviewing agreements. ARTstor
is in active discussions with the remaining museums. The currently
contributing museums are:

- The Art Institute of Chicago [http://www.artic.edu/]
- Asia Society [http://www.asiasociety.org/]
- The Cleveland Museum of Art [http://www.clevelandart.org/]
- Dallas Museum of Art [http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/]
- Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College [http://www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu/]
- Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco [http://www.thinker.org/]
- The Frick Collection [http://www.frick.org/]
- George Eastman House [http://www.eastmanhouse.org/]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art [http://www.lacma.org/]
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art [http://www.metmuseum.org/]
- The Minneapolis Institute of Arts [http://www.artsmia.org/]
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [http://mfa.org/]
- Philadelphia Museum of Art [http://www.philamuseum.org/main.asp]
- Smithsonian American Art Museum [http://americanart.si.edu/index3.cfm]
- Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute [http://www.clarkart.edu/]
- Terra Foundation for American Art [http://www.terraamericanart.org/]
- Victoria and Albert Museum [http://www.vam.ac.uk/]
- The Walters Art Museum [http://www.thewalters.org/]

ARTstor staff have made integrating former AMICO Library™ images into
ARTstor a high priority, in the interest of ensuring a smooth
transition for ARTstor users. By July 2005, approximately 30,000
museum contributed images will be available in ARTstor. We anticipate
that roughly 80,000 images will be added in the coming months; the
next release taking place in early fall 2005. At least a quarter of
the former AMICO museums are taking this transition as an opportunity
to provide better quality images and data to accompany existing
ARTstor content.. We feel confident that perhaps 70% of the former
AMICO Library™ will be represented in ARTstor by the end of 2005,
along with many museum images that were not part of AMICO in its
initial form.

As part of ARTstor’s mission to provide content that meets the
scholarly needs of researchers, we will continue to seek content from
the museum community. Additionally, ARTstor will continue to add
content to the current Charter Collection until we exceed our goal of
500,000 images.

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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.

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Other News

ARTstor has added a new report to the usage statistics site at http://stats.artstor.org.
The Monthly Summary Report provides counts of events, sessions, and
minutes. This report will also detail the number of unique users who
have logged in to ARTstor and the number of new registrations for a
given time period.

We hope that this additional information will be helpful to you as you
track usage at your institution. The usage reports are password
protected. If you do not have the password but need to access the
statistics, please contact userservices@artstor.org.

We are continuing to add daily training sessions throughout the
summer. To see the current calendar, please visit artstor.webex.com
and click on the "Upcoming" tab under "Attend a Session" > "Live
Sessions". Sessions are currently scheduled through June. Please check
the schedule often as we will try to post sessions at least 3-4 weeks
in advance.

Please note, all times on the schedule are Eastern Daylight Time. To
register for a session, please follow the instructions on this web
page: http://www.artstor.org/info/using_artstor/eut_register.jsp.