Collaborative Agreement Reached Between Oxford University and

Oxford University and ARTstor Inc. announced today that they had reached
an agreement whereby Oxford University's Bodleian Library and ARTstor
will collaborate on the digitization and distribution through ARTstor of
approximately 25,000 high quality images of manuscript paintings and
drawings from the Bodleian Library's outstanding collection of medieval
and renaissance illuminated western manuscripts.

With more than 10,000 volumes, the Bodleian Library's Department of
Special Collections and Western Manuscripts has one of the greatest
collections of western medieval manuscripts in the world. In recent
years, the Bodleian Library has - with support from the Getty Trust -
been developing an Electronic Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance
Manuscripts (see
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/medieval/). The
present collaboration with ARTstor will build on the foundation laid
through that important effort. Through this partnership, ARTstor will
digitize virtually all of the illuminated manuscript leaves from
Bodleian manuscripts through the 16th century, as well as selected 19th
and 20th- century manuscripts in the medieval tradition. The project
will also selectively include significant bindings, illuminated
initials, and text pages. The present 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 highly valued
materials will include not only art historians and medievalists but also
scholars, teachers, and students throughout the humanities and beyond,
who will value having the ability to access, browse, and make rich
educational and scholarly uses of this unique corpus of images.

In reaching this agreement, Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special
Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, expressed
his 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
Bodleian Library at Oxford is delighted to be working with ARTstor in
making the tens of thousands of manuscript illuminations in our
Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts more widely
available to students and researchers in the field." James Shulman,
ARTstor's Executive Director, expressed ARTstor's keen interest in this
partnership. "The Bodleian Library's medieval and renaissance manuscript
collections are legendary. We at ARTstor are delighted to help make
their artistic content more readily available to scholars, teachers and
students."

The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of
Oxford. It is also a copyright deposit library and its collections are
used by scholars from around the world. In addition, the Bodleian
consists of nine other libraries, in separate locations in Oxford: the
Bodleian Japanese Library, the Bodleian Law Library, the Hooke Library,
the Indian Institute Library, the Oriental Institute Library, the
Philosophy Library, the Radcliffe Science Library, the Bodleian Library
of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House and the Vere
Harmsworth Library.