Blog Category: Collection release

Through an agreement with the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and the Museo Opificio delle Pietre Dure (Florence, Italy), ARTstor has been supporting the rich photographic documentation of the recently restored bronze doors on the east side of the Florentine Baptistery, universally known as the “Gates of Paradise” (in Italian, “Porta del Paradiso”). The sculptural relief panels of the “Gates of Paradise,” produced during the second quarter of the fifteenth century by the great Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), constitute one of the most important art works of the early Italian Renaissance. After more than twenty-five years of work, the restoration of Ghiberti’s famous “Gates of Paradise” is nearing completion. ARTstor is sponsoring the comprehensive photographic documentation of the Gates of Paradise in their newly restored state. This photographic campaign has produced nearly 750 stunning, detailed photographs of Ghiberti’s relief sculptures in both their uncleaned and their restored states, all of which have now been digitized by ARTstor and the majority of which are now available as part of the ARTstor Digital Library.

We are pleased now to announce now that we have just released approximately 150 black-and-white photographs of frieze elements from the Gates of Paradise in their state prior to the recent cleaning campaign. These comparative materials underscore the importance of the recent restoration campaign and its photographic documentation by ARTstor.

To locate these and other images from the Ghiberti campaign in the ARTstor Image Gallery most readily, search for “Ghiberti Quattrone,” so as to retrieve only these new photographs (produced by the outstanding Florentine photographer, Antonio Quattrone).

You may also be interested in “A peek behind Ghiberti’s Florentine Baptistery Doors.“

ARTstor is pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement with Dr. Deepanjana Danda Klein, through which ARTstor will digitize her unique archive of photographic documentation of the more than 30 rock-cut cave temples at Ellora, India. The approximately 2,500 black-and-white and approximately 4,500 color photographs of the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave shrines at Ellora – produced in connection with a collaboration with Professor Walter Spink from University of Michigan and Deepanjana’s dissertation devoted to the site, now being published as an exhaustive scholarly study – will significantly strengthen and deepen ARTstor’s already strong collections in Asian Art.

Ellora has been described as a “site of outstanding cave temples, datable between c. AD 575 and the end of the 9th century, 20 km north of Aurangabad in the Sahyadri Hills, Maharashtra, India. The caves were excavated into volcanic rock along a 2-km stretch of west-facing embankment; there are 34 major caves, numbered consecutively rather than chronologically, starting with the Buddhist group (Caves 1–12) in the south. Other groups are dedicated to the Brahmanical pantheon (Caves 14–29) and to Jainism (Caves 30–34). The most notable monument is Cave 16, the Kailasa Temple” which “represents the culmination of rock-cut architecture, with huge sculptural reliefs heightening the overall symbolism of the temple as cosmic mountain and as the home of Shiva” (Grove Art Online).

The present photographic campaign at Ellora represents the first systematic documentation of the entire site, including the first photographs of previously undocumented caves. Dr. Walter Spink, Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan, speaks to the significance of the current project when he says “Due to the knowledge, energy, and technical expertise of Dr. Deepanjana Danda Klein and the enthusiastic cooperation of her husband, Dr. Arno Klein, scholars now finally have a truly comprehensive photographic coverage of this great site’s varied Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain material.” And Max Marmor, ARTstor Director of Collection Development, expressed ARTstor’s enthusiasm for this collaboration. “We have long admired the South Asian documentary efforts that have emerged from the University of Michigan over many years. The inclusion within ARTstor of Deepanjana Danda Klein’s documentation of the immensely important shrines at Ellora will significantly enrich ARTstor’s already strong offerings in the art of India, anchored by the Huntington Archive of Asian Art and the ACSAA Color Slide Project materials just now being added to ARTstor.” The first fruits of this project should be available to ARTstor users early in 2007.

ARTstor, in partnership with the Society of Architectural Historians, is pleased to announce its sponsorship of a forthcoming Guide to Best Practice for the use of Quick Time Virtual Reality (QTVR) in documenting archaeological, architectural and other cultural heritage sites. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia is coordinating the production of this much-needed guide.

Quick Time Virtual Reality (QTVR) is playing an increasingly important role documenting the history of architecture. QTVR panoramas provide the beholder with a powerful new sense of spatiality and the interconnectedness of the different parts of a building, monument or site; they hold the promise of transforming the teaching and the study of architectural history and archaeology. QTVR can potentially free teachers from their traditional dependence upon still images. It can help them to put art into its context and to take their students on surrogate tours of complex works of architecture. And yet QTVR panoramas are not easy to make in a way that ensures high quality imagery, a long “shelf life” for the QTVR as technology advances, proper attention to legal and ethical issues related to copyright and cultural patrimony, and comprehensibility and usability from the user’s point of view. In the absence of recognized standards for the creation of QTVR panoramas, what is needed is a “best practice” guide, focusing especially but not exclusively on QTVR. Such a guide will make it easier for scholars and photographers to produce 360-degree digital panoramas of sufficient quality to meet the needs of students and scholars in the field of architectural history for years to come.

The forthcoming guide will address such key topics as:

• The history and use of panoramic photography;
• Pre-production issues such as defining goals, selecting the site and site nodes, taking into account environmental considerations and scheduling, selecting equipment, access issues and budget;
• Copyright and permissions;
• Production issues such as types of digital panorama photography and structures, file formats, image capturing systems, workflow, lighting, site documentation, and short-term backup and storage;
• Related media such as audio and video;
• Post-production work, including stitching and rendering, data and documentation standards;
• Viewing, publication and use, including resource delivery and user issues;
• Storage and preservation.

Appendices will include a directory of relevant organizations, workflow diagrams, sample floor plans, checklists, guides to permissions, customs, copyright and laws in example countries, sample legal forms, workflow for image capture, pre-processing, stitching and rendering, batch scripts, metadata tables, recommended viewer platforms, browsers and viewers, case studies, glossary, bibliography and references.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is a research unit of the University of Virginia. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, it provides IATH Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications development, and networked publishing facilities. IATH also cultivates partnerships and participates in humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information technology companies, scholarly organizations, and other groups residing at the intersection of computers and cultural heritage.

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is an international not-for-profit membership organization that promotes the study and preservation of the built environment worldwide. The Society’s 3,500 members include architectural historians, architects, preservationists, students, professionals in allied fields and the interested public. Founded in 1940, membership in SAH is open to everyone, regardless of profession or expertise, who is interested in the study, interpretation, and protection of historically significant buildings, sites, cities and landscapes. The forthcoming Guide to Best Practices in QTVR will be widely disseminated in 2007.

The Museum of Modern Art and Artstor announced a project to digitize nearly 23,000 photographs from the MoMA Archives’ comprehensive collection of exhibition installation photographs and distribute them through Artstor. This material richly documents every major exhibition held at the Museum, beginning with the inaugural exhibition of 1929. Enhanced and comprehensive online access to this important collection will strongly encourage and advance scholarship on the history and institutions of modern art.

In reaching this agreement, Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and Museum Archives and Max Marmor, Artstor’s Director of Collection Development, expressed their shared enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies to make these high quality images of contemporary art and architecture more broadly available for noncommercial educational and scholarly purposes.

The Museum’s 75th Anniversary in 2004 gave us a chance to highlight this collection in a special publication, Art in Our Time, edited by Museum Archivist Michelle Elligott and Harriet Bee. Those images were only a small sampling of a vast body of important material, and we are grateful to Artstor for recognizing the value of digitizing the entire collection for distribution,” comments Hughston.

“Our new collaboration with staff of the MoMA Library and Archives,” adds Marmor, “represents an important milestone in Artstor’s ongoing effort to provide teachers, scholars and students with digital image collections documenting the development of modern and contemporary art. We are delighted to help make this important photographic archive available now online for non-commercial use in education and research.” The MoMA installation photographs are highly prized by art historians and other scholars. In addition to Art in Our Time, they provided the basis for Mary Anne Staniszewski’s pioneering The Power of Display: a History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

The MoMA Archives was established in 1989 to preserve and to make accessible historical documents about the Museum and modern and contemporary art. The Photographic Archive documents and maintains the complete visual history of the Museum. “The installation photographs of exhibitions at MoMA are a unique and valuable resource. Like the other collections in the Archives, these materials tell the story of modern and contemporary art. Because of MoMA’s singular role in the introduction and dissemination of modern art, these photos document this evolution and are critical to the study of modern art as well as the history of modern museums, and the field of installation design,” according to Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist.

Artstor is pleased to announce the release into the Artstor Digital Library of over 25,000 images, most of which were formerly a part of the AMICO collection. As of today, users of Artstor will be able to view images provided by the following museums:

• Asia Society
• The Cleveland Museum of Art
• Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College
• The Frick Collection and Art Reference Library
• George Eastman House
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Victoria and Albert Museum
• The Walters Art Museum

To locate these images, which have been integrated into the Image Gallery and its browsing taxonomy, you can use “AMICO” as a keyword when searching. For best results, combine “AMICO” with additional search criteria, such as repository or creator name.
In early August, we anticipate releasing approximately 85,000 additional images from:

• Dallas Museum of Art
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• Indianapolis Museum of Art
• Library of Congress
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Philadelphia Museum of Art

We will make additional announcements when those images are available in the Library and will continue to keep you updated of additional releases of images and of new museum agreements as they are reached. For more information about our work on the AMICO project, please see our past announcement regarding this collaboration.

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), a non-profit consortium of 39 museums, and Artstor, a non-profit organization sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announced today that AMICO will be phasing out its independent operations as it focuses on supporting Artstor’s emerging leadership role in providing broad based access to what is expected to be the world’s largest single collection of online art images designed specifically for use by the education, research and arts communities. Both organizations expressed their belief that this important step will help museums, educational institutions, libraries, teachers, scholars, and students create and use this significant new community resource for the educational use of documented works of art. In phasing out its operations and endorsing Artstor’s role, AMICO affirms to the museum and educational communities that Artstor is well poised to carry forth and expand upon the mission that AMICO embarked on more than five years ago, when museum leaders recognized the vital need for an online library of high quality art images and associated data. While each museum that contributes content to AMICO will independently determine whether to make that content available through Artstor, both AMICO and Artstor expressed strong support for their continued sharing of their collections through Artstor.

AMICO’s operations are scheduled to conclude in August 2005. Until then, it will continue to support the independent distributors of its image library as well as the needs of its museum membership and library subscribers. During this period, AMICO will also be sharing with Artstor the experiences and knowledge gained over its years of operations as well as the software tools and standards for collection aggregation and distribution it has developed. AMICO and Artstor expect that this will help ensure a smooth migration of AMICO museum image contributions to Artstor for museums that choose to do so, as well as further bolster the confidence of AMICO subscribers that Artstor is upholding the high standards for content that characterized the AMICO collection.

“The art museums that make up AMICO have achieved something extraordinary by having created a uniquely effective cooperative program for making digital art images available,” said Michael Conforti, Chairman of AMICO, and director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. “AMICO’s critical and path-breaking work will continue to be advanced into the future through ARTstor’s broad community-wide initiative,” Conforti added, “and we hope that as many museums as possible will see the advantages of and making their work available through Artstor’s digital library.”

“I am certain that the opportunity for Artstor to draw from AMICO’s strengths will allow Artstor to build upon and extend the pioneering achievements of AMICO in order to create a valuable resource for education in fields that draw upon the visual arts,” stated Neil L. Rudenstine, former president of Harvard and Chairman of the Artstor board.

Founded in 1996, the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is a not-for-profit consortium of institutions nationwide that have been collaborating to enable educational use of museum collection images and multimedia. With a library that numbers over 140,000 images, AMICO began as the vision of Maxwell L. Anderson, former director of the Whitney Museum and past President of the Association of Art Museum Directors, with a goal of providing educational institutions that license the AMICO Library with access to museum multimedia for educational use.

Anderson commented, “AMICO is today poised to hand off to Artstor an unparalleled range of experience in making rich multimedia broadly available to educational users. All of us associated with AMICO are extremely hopeful about Artstor’s future under the leadership of its Chairman Neil Rudenstine and its Executive Director James Shulman. Their commitment, together with the Mellon Foundation’s peerless advocacy of art museums and higher education, will yield great progress in making illustrated art collections widely accessible in the years ahead.”

“We have enormous admiration for Max Anderson’s original and bold vision,” said James Shulman, executive director of Artstor, “and the way he and the AMICO staff transformed that vision into a reality. Their collective talent and the Herculean efforts of the staff at the member museums have shown the enormous community-wide benefits of collaboration.”

Initiative Sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Serve Educational and Cultural Communities

April 12, 2004. Artstor, a non-profit initiative founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announces the availability of its Digital Library to non-profit educational and cultural institutions in the United States starting this summer.

The Artstor Digital Library is comprised of digital images and related data; the tools to make active use of those images; and an online environment intended to balance the interests of users with those of content providers. Artstor’s “Charter Collection” will contain approximately 300,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines, and it seeks to offer sufficient breadth and depth to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities. The Charter Collection is anticipated to grow to half a million images by the summer of 2006.

Artstor was established with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. James Shulman, the Executive Director of Artstor, noted that “The impact of digitization on teaching and scholarship becomes increasingly clear every day. Artstor is working with museums, colleges, universities, libraries, archives and others around the world in an effort to ensure that these dramatic changes happen in thoughtful ways. We are excited by the chance to play a role in a community-wide effort that represents many aspects of the world’s collective cultural heritage.”

According to Neil L. Rudenstine, Artstor’s chairman and president emeritus of Harvard University, “The growing need for an accessible source of digital images has become a significant problem at many educational institutions that are using limited resources to build and sustain their own image archives. Artstor hopes to help address this need by working with institutions to build a digital collection capable of both system-wide growth and expansion at individual institutions, so that participants will have significantly more material for educational and scholarly uses.”

The Charter Collection is meant to serve as a campus-wide resource that is focused on, but not limited to, the arts. It documents artistic and historical traditions across many time-periods and cultures and has been derived from several source collections that are themselves the product of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic archives, publishers, slide libraries, and individual scholars. Source collections include:

The Image Gallery: A collection of 200,000 images of world art and culture corresponding to the contents of a university slide library, constructed in response to college teaching needs. Since the images have been cataloged with subject headings, they will be useful both to those in the arts and in many other fields;

The Carnegie Arts of the United States: A widely used collection of images documenting aspects of the history of American art, architecture, visual and material culture;

The Huntington Archive of Asian Art: A broad photographic overview of the art of Asia from 3000 B.C. through the present;

The Illustrated Bartsch: A collection derived from the art reference publication of the same name, containing images and data related to more than 50,000 old master European prints from the 15th to 19th Centuries;

The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive: High resolution images of wall paintings and sculpture from the Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China, along with related objects and art from the caves that are now in museums and libraries in Europe and the United States; and

The MoMA Architecture and Design Collection: A comprehensive collection of high resolution images representing the holdings of the Department of Architecture and Design of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Artstor has developed software tools that will allow users at participating institutions to use its Charter Collection without the need for any other software. Users will be able to view and analyze images through features such as zooming and panning. They will be able to save groups of images for personal or group uses, as well as for use in lectures and other presentation, either online or off-line.

Participation fees for Artstor’s Charter Collection are listed now at Participating in Artstor. Thirty-five test institutions have had access to the software and image repository during the past academic year, including: the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, Hunter College, James Madison University, Johns Hopkins University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, Smith College, University of California at San Diego, Williams College and the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute.

As William G. Bowen, the President of the Mellon Foundation, noted: “The fit between new technology and visual images is an unusually promising one. The ability to combine – and make active use of – images, data, texts and other materials offers the opportunity to bring about a substantial and exciting transformation in art-related teaching, learning, and research.”

For more information about participating in Artstor, please see the Participation Info section of the Artstor website.