* Personal Collections available in ARTstor *

We are pleased to announce to our Primary, User Support and Technical
Contacts the availability of ARTstor's Personal Collection Tools. We
have recognized from the outset that it is essential to enable and
facilitate the integration of ARTstor's content with other digital
content available to participating institutions and individual ARTstor
users. These Personal Collection Tools have been developed to allow
individual end-users to add their own images into the online ARTstor
environment. Each user will have his or her own private Personal
Collection section of online ARTstor. Once a user uploads images to
this part of the site, he or she will be able to add those images to
public or private image groups and make use of them like any other
image in ARTstor.

First, here is an example of how Personal Collections can be helpful.
Professor Smith is teaching an architecture class. He has taken
several digital photographs on a recent trip to Chicago and would like
to use them for a lecture. He is aware of the ability to do that with
the Offline Image Viewer. However, Professor Smith encourages his
students to review his lectures online in ARTstor Image Groups. Unless
Professor Smith can upload his images for creating his Image Group –
the basis of his lecture – he will only be able to present his lecture
offline. Sharing his lecture through an OIV presentation file is still
possible but more difficult than directing students to the ARTstor
website to review his Image Group.

By default, your users' Personal Collections are disabled and your
users will not see links for Personal Collections tools in ARTstor.
This email is being sent to you to provide more information about the
policy surrounding ARTstor's Personal Collections tool and to instruct
you in the few, simple steps you must take in order to activate
Personal Collections for the users at your institution. We will wait
at least one week before announcing the availability of Personal
Collections to our Announcement Mailing List. Before that time, you
may want to try to configure your service at the Administrative Level
via these steps:

- Visit our SuperAdmin website at http://admin.artstor.org.

- Log in with the access code and password that your institution uses
to obtain instructor privileges. (If you don't have that information,
please contact us [userservices@artstor.org] and we will provide it.)

- Select the "Enable Personal Collections for Users" link from the
left-hand navigation bar. You will see a list of all users at your
institution who have Instructor Privileges, and are therefore eligible
to create Personal Collections.

You now have the following configuration choices.

- You can enable Personal Collections for all of your current and
future users with Instructor Privileges.

To give every current user Personal Collection privileges, use the
checkbox next to "Select All" to activate every user on the list.
Check the box to "Automatically enable Personal Collections for any
future users with Instructor Privileges" at the bottom of the page if
you want all future users to automatically have Personal Collections
enabled when they register for Instructor Privileges.

- You can enable Personal Collections for individual users with
Instructor Privileges as needed.

Select users one at a time by checking the checkbox next to their
email addresses. Do not check the box to "Automatically enable
Personal Collections for any future users with Instructor Privileges"
at the bottom of the page. By not choosing this option, you will
require each user to contact you in order to activate Personal
Collections for themselves. That may provide a desirable opportunity
to discuss copyright or set other relevant standards for uploading.

If you would like your deactivated users to see the links to Personal
Collections tools, clear the checkbox next to "Don't show Personal
Collection links to instructors if their Personal Collections are not
enabled in the list above." A deactivated user will be able to select
the link to upload images to his or her Personal Collection but
instead of being able to upload images, he or she will see this
message: "To enable your Personal Collection, please contact your
local ARTstor administrator: [contact information]". The contact name
will be the same as currently listed to request Instructor Privileges.
Please let us know[4] if you would like to change the contact name.

- You can leave Personal Collections disabled for all individual
users.

If you do not intend to invite any of your users to participate in
Personal Collections, select the checkbox next to "Don't show Personal
Collection links to instructors if their Personal Collections are not
enabled in the list above." This will effectively "opt out" of the
service and your users won't be troubled or confused by grayed-out
links to Personal Collections.

If you decide to enable your users to participate in Personal
Collections, here is some additional information about the tools. You
should also download this handout [http://www.artstor.org/info/using_artstor/personalcollections.pdf] and distribute it to new Personal
Collections users.

When a user adds an image from a local drive (be it something scanned,
purchased, or taken with a digital camera), the image file is uploaded
to the remote ARTstor server and a derivative image file that allows
the user to zoom in on the image (like any other ARTstor image) is
created in FPX format. Original images can be uploaded in any of the
following image formats: JPG / JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, or PNG.

The original uploaded file is then discarded, since our keeping it
would (depending upon the size of the file) begin to represent a
significant amount of storage space. If the user decides to
save/download their uploaded images out of ARTstor, the image will be
exported in jpg format at the original dimensions. (These images will
not be restricted to the 400 pixel maximum; if a 1600 x 1600 pixel
image is uploaded, a 1600 x 1600 pixel JPG will be available for
download.)

The user is able to catalog uploaded images and to sort them into
topics. Each time the user logs in, he or she will now see a "My
Personal Collection" listed after the other ARTstor Collections in the
ARTstor Library. This Collection can be searched, opened and browsed
just like other ARTstor collections; but it is visible only to the
individual user and – depending on security choices the individual
makes – his or her institution.

There are two levels of security for Personal Collection images:
limited access and institutional access. Each image is assigned a
security level of limited access by default. Access levels can be
altered on an image-by-image basis. Here are the definitions for both
levels of security.

Limited access:

- Only a search by the creator will retrieve the image
- Only the creator can save the image into an Image Group
- Only the creator can download a copy of the image
- Only the creator can print a copy of the image
- Only the creator can save the image into an OIV presentation
- All other users can view the image when saved in an Image Group to
which they have access

Institutional access:

- A search by any institutional user will retrieve the image
- All institutional users can save the image into an Image Group
- All institutional users can download a copy of the image
- All institutional users can print a copy of the image
- All institutional users can save the image into an OIV presentation

Please note that in order to save Personal Collection images into an
OIV presentation, the user must have downloaded and installed the most
recent version of the OIV software, version 2.0. OIV derivatives are
created hourly and can be downloaded into OIV 2.0 an hour or two after
uploading new images.

The challenges involved in rolling out this service have not been
about the technology but rather about the intersection between an
outside entity (ARTstor), you, and your users. Personal Collections
are akin to creating reserves (where you are accustomed to managing
the process of individual users creating or modifying content that
they share with others on campus) but the policies are made more
complex by our role as the locus where this sharing takes place.

We have attempted to set our policy in a way that protects the
usefulness of this tool while setting some meaningful guidelines for
the service. However, our initial policy is provisional and subject to
change as we learn more about how this tool will be used.

- We believe that in the near term, this capacity should be limited to
those individuals to whom you have assigned Instructor Privileges.
This will enable all of us to learn together how the service works
within a more controlled environment. Students who are making
presentations will, of course, still be able to add images to the
Offline Image Viewer, but would not have the personal collections
tools at this point. Limiting access for the time being is
particularly valuable as we better understand, together, the
intellectual property issues associated with ARTstor's serving as a
remote host for content added by individuals at a participating
institution.

- We have decided to allot server space by individuals. While it seems
more intuitive to provide a cap on the number of images (that can then
be managed by the institution), the far more relevant measure is the
total memory utilized. Hence, for the academic year 2005-2006, we are
proposing that individuals receive 500MB of Personal Collection space
each. (500MB could potentially store up to 2000 image files –
depending on the image resolution.) This approach will allow us to
test provisionally the costs and benefits of providing such a service.
If, in the future, we find that individuals are in need of additional
space, we will explore alternative solutions.

- We will provide institutions with additional SuperAdmin tools that
will allow the contact person to review the personal collection usage
and determine which collections are to be maintained on an ongoing
basis, and also to upload images into personal collection on behalf of
users with instructor's privileges. These tools should be made
available before the Spring Semester 2006;

- Since we really have no way of fully understanding the costs
associated with providing this service to what is currently about 450
institutions, we still may need to charge some modest fees for the
service at some point. For the time being, however, we are planning on
launching the service as outlined in this note for no fees (provided
institutions work within the storage caps described above). All images
added in the 2005-2006 year would be maintained for no cost through
the end of the academic year 2008-2009. With this promise in hand, we
hope that users will use the system without fear that their efforts
will be wasted.

- Since we are still learning about the long-term consequences of
storing and serving this content back to institutions, we propose that
we will plan to work with users who intend to move to different
participating institutions to migrate their personal collections to a
different participating institution so that the work of uploading the
collection would not be lost;

- Finally, we will provide separate disclaimers to inform individuals
of their responsibilities in selecting and posting content and will
indicate that neither ARTstor, nor the institution with which the
institution is affiliated, will be screening such content and
therefore could not take responsibility for it.