Overview

ARTstor is developing Shared Shelf in response to the community's interest in a cataloging and image management system that will allow institutions to manage, actively use, and — should an institution so choose — share their institutional and faculty image collections. This web-based, enterprise-level service will also enable seamless integration of image collections with the ARTstor Digital Library content and interface. Shared Shelf will make it feasible for institutions to combine their institutional collections and faculty collections, and to share those collections — whether that sharing occurs across a single institution, across multiple institutions, across a geographically distributed body of scholarly users (such as the Society of Architectural Historians), or across the open web — and to do so without the need for local onsite infrastructure.

ARTstor is collaborating closely with nine institutional partners (listed below) and an initial group of early adopters who are contributing significant staff knowledge, time, and investment funds to develop this common software platform. The goal is to create an efficient and innovative image management, cataloging and usage infrastructure, informed by the expertise of the community. Over the past two years, we have worked closely with the staff at these institutions to understand their workflow and to develop requirements for a system that is flexible enough to serve a range of image management needs at a range of institutional types.

By working with ARTstor in partnership with colleagues at other institutions, we see the potential to emerge with a service that unites locally distributed image management functions in a scalable and standards-driven system, with the added benefit of the accumulated knowledge from our colleagues at other institutions and at ARTstor. We believe all the ingredients are present for a much stronger product to emerge from this collaboration.

Beth Sandore, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Planning and Policy and Associate Dean of Libraries, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Shared Shelf developed out of ARTstor's pilot hosting program, which concluded in December 2010 (former ARTstor Hosting Advisory Group Members). During the pilot period, more than two million images from 150 colleges, universities, and museums were uploaded to the ARTstor Digital Library software platform, providing seamless integration and cross searching with ARTstor Digital Library’s own collections of more than 1.2 million images. The ability to bring together institutional and ARTstor collections through a single discovery interface proved valuable to scholars and teachers in many different academic fields. While building and managing image collections during the pilot hosting program was highly labor-intensive, difficult to scale, and limited in its ability to allow for the timely uploading and updating of hosted content, Shared Shelf will provide a networked platform and tools that will make it possible to easily integrate and update hosted institutional collections. Shared Shelf will also enable institutions to nominate their collections to be included in the ARTstor Digital Library, thereby facilitating a range of ways to expand a trusted and collaborative network of visual content to support teaching and research.

Shared Shelf will enable the management and sharing of art, architecture, humanities, and social sciences images and also offers a high degree of flexibility for managing other types of image collections, ranging from communications and public relations images to images in the sciences (such as natural history, astronomy, medical images, etc.). The capacity exists for tailoring metadata schemas and related cataloging screens to accommodate this range of content, and we continue to explore additional services (including customizable end user discovery interfaces that utilize the functions of the ARTstor Digital Library software) that would make such non-art uses fully responsive to user needs.

Shared Shelf grows out of years of work with partners on campuses — in libraries, visual resource centers, and instructional technology offices. The Shared Shelf Steering Group has informed the development of Shared Shelf, and the utilities and services that make up the platform were designed in response to the expressed needs of staff (and end users) at our partner institutions. While the system will continue to be developed over the coming years, the first release made available in 2011 will offer very strong functionality, including the ability to manage institutional and faculty members' personal collections, and seamlessly integrate them with ARTstor content without delay.

Shared Shelf Steering Group Members

• Overview
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  • Publish to the Web & Export Tools
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