Technology platform

ARTstor Public Website In September 2007, ARTstor released a redesigned public website as the first of two important phases in our transition to a new interface and software platform. While release of the ARTstor website and Digital Library will be incremental over the coming months, they are being developed as a unified platform that will provide visual continuity between our informational website and the content-rich Digital Library. When fully released, users will enter ARTstor and remain in a seamless web environment.

In September 2007, ARTstor released a redesigned public website as the first of two important phases in our transition to a new interface and software platform.

The ARTstor Digital Library

While the first phase of ARTstor's redesign and software platform migration applies to our informational website, the second phase relates to the ARTstor Digital Library. We anticipate releasing a Beta version of the ARTstor Digital Library in the coming months with a full release in 2008. The existing ARTstor Digital Library platform will be available in parallel with ARTstor Beta for the near term to ensure the stability of the new software platform and to give institutions ample time to migrate to the new environment. All users will have the option of using the Beta version, and we encourage you to send us your feedback.

ARTstor digital library has been available since 2004 on a Java-based thin client platform allowing for functionality (such as dragging and dropping images) that our users need. In recent months, we have been re-developing ARTstor using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) — which allows for significantly greater flexibility than the thin client platform, and provides greater system efficiencies. While current functionality in the ARTstor Digital Library will remain the same, ARTstor Beta will sit within the browser rather than launch a Java client, and therefore will look and feel much more like a website. Users will experience improved performance and speed, and ARTstor will be able to provide greater functionality and respond more nimbly to needed software changes over time. As a direct result of user feedback, ARTstor Beta will include these among other improvements:

simplified navigation menus;
a focus on the main activities of discovery (search and browse) in the welcome screen;
introduction of a new area called "My ARTstor" where users will more easily navigate to their personal collections and saved citation lists;
a "showcase" space for hosted collections;
internal stable URLs for internal bookmarking; and
significantly improved performance.