Shared Shelf history & mission
Shared Shelf is a cataloging and image management service created by ARTstor that is being developed over a three-year period with nine institutional partners as well as our Hosting Pilot Program advisers. ARTstor is a nonprofit organization, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and associated fields. ARTstor launched the Digital Library in July 2004 to provide educational and scholarly users with access to a shared repository of images for teaching and research. Today, ARTstor Digital Library serves more than 1,300 institutions worldwide, and provides access to more than 1.2 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Over the years, the community has valued not only the wide range of high-quality image collections in the Digital Library, but also its intuitive software tools and interface for discovering and working with images. The ARTstor Hosting Pilot Program was initiated to address the desires of many institutions to host their own institutional collections alongside ARTstor Digital Library collections in the Digital Library's discovery environment. The Hosting Pilot Program (2006-2010), which hosts more than two million images from 150 institutions, demonstrated that there was a need in educational and museum communities for software tools to manage and publish images to networked environments. Shared Shelf grew out of the community's interest in having a Web-based image management software that would allow institutions to easily integrate their collections with the ARTstor Digital Library and/or publish those images to their own institutional websites or other websites. The Shared Shelf endeavor is intended to further fulfill the ARTstor mission to use digital technology to enhance the use of visual materials in education and scholarship in the arts and sciences.
