Overview: What is ARTstor?

Torres Strait Islander people; Mask ARTstor is a digital library of approximately 700,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.

The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools. The Digital Library serves users both within the arts and in disciplines outside of the arts. This includes historians of art and architecture and others engaged in the visual arts, as well as individuals in fields as diverse as American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Literary Studies, Medieval Studies, Music, Religious Studies, and Renaissance Studies, all of whom find the images in ARTstor to be relevant to their teaching and research. To learn more, please see our section on Interdisciplinary uses.

Institutions typically enter a site-wide license with ARTstor through their library. Access is granted through IP authentication. Site licenses to ARTstor allow unlimited number of simultaneous users to access the Digital Library, both on-site and remotely via username/password. In addition, institutions have access to a dedicated support team and on-line training.

In ARTstor you can:

Browse content by collection, classification, or geography
Search content by keyword or advanced search terms (e.g., date and geographic origin)
Sort search results by date, creator, or title
View images and image data
Zoom in on and pan images for greater detail
Print and save images and related data to other hardware (e.g. CD, memory stick, hard drive)
Create groups of images for later retrieval and presentation
Organize image groups into shared folders
Direct other ARTstor users to images or image groups
Upload personal images and sound files to the ARTstor platform
Export images and image groups to ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer (OIV) presentation tool
Save citations for images or image groups, and email or print these, as well as export them directly into EndNote, ProCite, RefWorks, Reference Manager, or a text file

Image credits

Torres Strait Islander people; Mask; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; ARTstor ID# AMICO_METRO_103825482