A collaboration between Abaris Books (an imprint of the Opal Publishing Corporation), the Council on Library and Information Resources, and Luna Imaging, Inc. has contributed more than 50,000 images of European prints from the 15th to the early 19th centuries to the Artstor Digital Library.

The foundation of the selection is The Illustrated Bartsch (100+ volumes, Norwalk, CT, Abaris Books, 1978 – ongoing), an encyclopedic and authoritative compilation of European printmakers from the Renaissance through the mid 1800s, including engraving, etching, woodcut and other techniques. The inspiration of General Editor Walter L. Strauss (1922 – 1988), a distinguished scholar in the field of 16th-century German prints, The Illustrated Bartsch is based on Adam von Bartsch’s (1757-1821) ambitious but unillustrated catalog of Old Master prints. The digitized collection, generated through the support of the Mellon Foundation, offers all of the images (scanned mostly from 5×7 in. black-and-white photographic prints) and cataloging information found in the first 96 volumes of this exhaustive reference work.