What is ARTstor?
Collections
ARTstor's collection development policy is both user-driven and community-driven. As a not-for-profit, ARTstor's only stakeholders are the users and the institutions that champion their interests, and thus, their requests for new collections and images help shape the development of the Digital Library. The Digital Library consists of more than 60 collections that have been added to the library because the images have noted teaching value, research value, or because the community has asked for a particular body of content. We try, whenever possible, to add images for use both inside and outside the classroom. For instance, the Digital Library includes a large but representative, academic visual resources collection to ensure that images that have formed the backbone of teaching in the arts and humanities for decades are available in ARTstor. Similarly, we strive to build partnerships with photographers and photographic archives whose images are widely used in teaching and learning contexts. Examples include the Carnegie Arts of the United States, architectural images from Hartill Art Associates, Asian art from the University of Michigan's American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) Color Slide Project, and contemporary art and architecture from ART on FILE.
Additionally, ARTstor has incorporated approximately 85 percent of the former AMICO library with more than 90,000 images from over 20 Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO)-contributing museums. Several of the former AMICO museums are working with us to provide additional images from their collections, enhanced cataloging information, and/or higher-quality images for the records we already have. In this way, we not only ensure that the Digital Library contains the images most useful for teaching and research, but also that those images are of high quality to allow for zooming in on details and closer analysis.
In addition, we work with individual photographers, scholars, special collections at libraries, and photo archives (such as the Frick and the National Gallery in Washington). We also collaborate with Art Resource, the Scala Archives, and the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives to regularly add new high-quality images both of museum objects — these include over 20,000 works from major European museums — and of images of art, architecture, and archaeological sites photographed in situ.
Refer to our Descriptions & status page for a detailed collection listing and supplemental information about each collection.
Image credits
Cambodian, Khmer; Palaquin Hook, 1175-1230; Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art 1982.12, Cambodia; ARTstor ID# ACSAA_MICHIGAN_1039615179
© Cleveland Museum of Art/Asian Art Archives, University of Michigan
