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Blog Category: Organization

December 10, 2010

Artstor Travel Awards 2011

While the digital age is opening up new ways of using images of the world’s cultural heritage in teaching and scholarship, there is no substitute for engaging with original works and sites or primary source material, or for attending conferences with colleagues. In recognition of this need, Artstor is providing five travel awards in the amount of $1,500 each (to be used by December 31, 2012) to help support the educational and scholarly activities—such as flying to a conference—of graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field.

To be considered for an award, applicants must create and submit an Artstor image group (or a series of image groups) and a single accompanying essay that creatively and compellingly demonstrates why the image group(s) is useful for teaching, research, or scholarship. These submissions will help us better understand the uses that scholars and teachers are making of the Artstor Digital Library’s content and tools and will provide insight into how we can better serve the educational community. The five winning submissions will be determined by Artstor staff. Please note that this award is not intended to sponsor new photography for the Artstor Digital Library.

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December 10, 2010

Artstor and Avery Library Awarded IMLS National Leadership Grant

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a three-year National Leadership grant to Artstor and The Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. The funds will be used to support the new Built Works Registry (BWR), a community-generated data resource for architectural works and the built environment. BWR will be available to scholars and catalogers from academic and cultural heritage organizations worldwide. BWR data will also be contributed to the Getty Vocabulary Program’s planned Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA). See the BWR press release.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. For more information about the 2010 National Leadership Grants, go to the IMLS website.

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October 4, 2010

Artstor Joins National Digital Stewardship Alliance as Founding Member

Artstor is pleased to serve as a founding member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) along with 50 other prominent organizations. As an outgrowth of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the NDSA is headed by the Library of Congress as “a collaborative effort among government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and businesses to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of citizens now and in the future.”

Artstor was invited to join the NDSA as the recipient of a grant through the NDIIPP program in 2007. The Library of Congress recognizes Artstor for advancing the understanding of the management of born-digital still images by encouraging its contributing photographers to use embedded metadata as a means of packaging and delivering their content. In fulfillment of the original grant, Artstor advocates the use of existing metadata structures and tools for embedding metadata and has developed an application for extracting metadata — Artstor’s Embedded Metadata Extraction Tool (EMET). EMET is an open-source software tool that will be freely available for download as a stand-alone application by December 2010. EMET will facilitate the life-cycle management of digital images and their incorporation into external databases and applications.

As a member of the NDSA, Artstor will participate in two working groups:

  • Standards and Practices: Developing, following, and promoting effective methods for selecting, organizing, preserving, and serving digital content.
  • Infrastructure: Developing and maintaining tools for curation and preservation, and providing storage, hosting, migration, or similar services for the long-term preservation of digital content.

Johanna Bauman, Senior Production Manager, will represent Artstor in the Standards and Practices working group. Continuing the work already begun as part of the NDIIPP grant, Bauman will bring her experience to bear in collaborating with the photographers and institutions who are sharing their images in the Artstor Digital Library. William Ying, Chief Information Officer, will participate in the Infrastructure working group. Ying has years of expertise overseeing and building the architecture of the Digital Library and is now spearheading the development of Shared Shelf, a web-based image management software service. Both the Artstor Digital Library and Shared Shelf are major infrastructure projects that will further enhance the ability of institutions to curate, share, and preserve digital content.

Artstor looks forward to continuing its work with the Library of Congress and the NDSA partners to advance the standards and practices of the digital preservation.

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May 13, 2010

Artstor Travel Award Winners 2010

Congratulations to the five winners of Artstor Travel Awards 2010! The following winners will receive $1,500 each to be used for their own teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year.*

Travel Award 2010 Winners

Sara Nair James
Professor of Art History, Mary Baldwin College
A course with no book? Artstor to the rescue!

Lois Kuyper-Rushing
Associate Librarian and Head, Carter Music Resources Center,
Louisiana State University Libraries
Music Iconography and Artstor

Katherine E. Manthorne
Professor of Art of the United States, Latin America, and Their Cross-Currents, 1750-1950, Art History Program, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Sweet Fortunes: Sugar, Race, Art and Patronage in the Americas, 1750-1950

Kristina Richardson
Assistant Professor of Islamic History, Queens College, The City University of New York
Imagining Disability through Christian and Muslim Bodies

Steven Wills
Coordinator, Wachovia Education Resource Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Proportion and Perspective

Artstor received nearly 150 fascinating submissions, which had us absolutely transfixed over the past month as we reviewed all of the essays and accompanying image groups. Through these wonderful submissions we learned about how users are finding, using, and re-thinking the images in the Digital Library. The essays revealed the creative and interdisciplinary ways that scholars, curators, educators, and students at universities, community colleges, museums, and libraries are integrating Artstor image collections into their teaching and research in a broad range of topics: musicology, geometry, film studies, the Berlin Wall, disability studies, food and cuisine, Southeast Asian studies, medieval pilgrimage roads, Gothic architecture, Native American weaving techniques, drawing methods with pen and ink, European fashion design, Renaissance literature, history of slavery, Progressive Era reforms, daguerreotype conservation, library cataloging practices, and much more.

In reviewing the submissions, we learned a great deal about how users discover the images they want to work with, how they organize that content, and how they use image groups for teaching, publishing, and research to find non-digital research materials. A number of the projects also described iterative search strategies that were employed in constructing image groups, reminding us that Artstor must continue to improve access and search in the Digital Library because users want to discover images based on the language of their discipline or area of interest.

It was extremely difficult for us to select five winners from the nearly 150 submissions from around the world due to exceptional quality of so many essays and image groups. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the Artstor Travel Awards 2010. We believe that the value of our learning from the community through this program and our supporting the research and teaching activities of our users is vital to the Artstor mission. Therefore, we will be offering the Travel Award program on an ongoing annual basis.

We look forward to your continued feedback and participation in the Artstor endeavor to share and promote image collections for educational and scholarly purposes.

Sincerely,
The Artstor Staff

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February 4, 2010

Artstor Travel Awards 2010

The Artstor Travel Awards program will provide five research travel awards in the amount of $1,500 each to support educational and scholarly activities. While the digital age is opening up new approaches and techniques for using images of the world’s cultural heritage as evidence in teaching and scholarship, there is no substitute for engagement with original works and sites, for research in archives that hold primary source material, or for attending conferences with colleagues engaged with similar issues. In recognition of this need, Artstor will provide five research travel awards in the amount of $1,500 each (to be used by September 1, 2011) to help support the educational and scholarly activities of graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences.

To be considered for a research travel award, applicants must create and submit an Artstor image group (or a series of image groups) and a single accompanying essay that creatively and compellingly demonstrates why the image group(s) is useful for teaching, research, or scholarship. The five winning submissions will be determined by Artstor staff. These submissions will help Artstor to understand better the uses that scholars and teachers are making of Artstor’s content and tools and will provide us with insights into how we can continue to improve our efforts to serve the educational community.

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April 25, 2008

Society of Architectural Historians Architectural Visual Resources Network

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has received a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the SAH Architecture Visual Resource Network (SAH AVRN) a dynamic online library of architectural and landscape images for research and teaching.

To develop content for SAH AVRN, SAH is collaborating with scholars and librarians from partner institutions, initially MIT, Brown University and the University of Virginia to contribute images and metadata to SAH AVRN, a shared resource that will be widely available. Initially images will be contributed to SAH AVRN by scholars at the same three institutions who have agreed to share thousands of their own images that were taken for research and pedagogical purposes. To develop the technology for this online resource, SAH is working closely with Artstor, building upon the existing Artstor platform for storage, retrieval, viewing and presentation of images, and to develop tools to be used in conjunction with SAH AVRN.

For a full description of the SAH AVRN project, please visit sah.org.

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November 15, 2007

Artstor receives grant for preserving born digital images

The Library of Congress, through the National Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), has awarded Artstor a grant as part of its new Preserving Creative America initiative to address the long-term preservation of creative content in digital form.

The award will allow Artstor to conduct research with several individual photographers and organizations to determine what technical and preservation metadata should be captured and embedded in their files to help make their born digital images “archive-ready.” Artstor will also create a tool to help photographers embed technical and preservation data in their files. Data will extend beyond the camera data already captured by many digital cameras, but also include information on the authenticity of the file—what state or version the file represents, the original filename, whether any adjustments were done to the file in Photoshop or other applications (for example, tonal or color enhancements were performed, or particular content was cropped out of the image). The tool would allow for exporting this data embedded in the file into a database, whether a simple Excel spreadsheet, FilemakerPro database, Extensis Portfolio, or a digital asset management system.

To help determine data requirements and to test the tool, Artstor is partnering with: Northwestern University, a partner in developing the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive; The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation, which is creating high resolution digital photographs of a substantial body of the Albers works; Rob Wilkinson from Art on File, an architectural photographer who documents contemporary architecture in the United States; and Artesia, a digital asset management system used by a range of non-profits and companies. The eventual minimal dataset will be mapped to the NISO Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images Standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.87 – 2006).

The project will begin with requirements gathering for the recommended minimal technical and preservation data that should be embedded in a digital still image file. The second phase will involve creating and testing an editing tool. The project should be completed in September 2009.

For more information please see the Library of Congress NDIIP website.

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November 15, 2007

Sharing Visual Arts Images for Educational Use: Finding a New Angle of Repose

The current issue of Educause Review features an article written by Artstor’s General Counsel, Gretchen Wagner. The article, “Sharing visual arts images for educational use: Finding a new angle of repose,” discusses current practices across campuses in building and maintaining institutional image repositories, and the copyright implications of such practices. The article encourages the sharing of these resources for teaching and scholarship through greater reliance on fair use.

Since the emergence of copystand photography in the early twentieth century, campuses have relied on the U.S. copyright doctrine of fair use to protect the now widespread practice of scanning images from books and other printed materials for use in the classroom. With the advent of digital technologies, educational institutions now have the opportunity to share those collections to meet the teaching needs of multiple institutions. Gretchen enumerates some of the disadvantages of maintaining the current, “siloed” approach, including the copyright implications of not asserting fair use in a shared context. She also describes some of Artstor’s experiences in working with rights holders in the visual arts, from which she asserts that visual arts images could be shared for teaching and study in ways that are consistent with fair use, and that would bring benefits to rights holders as well as to educational users.

The article is available online in full text through Educause Review.

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January 26, 2005

Institutional Hosting Pilot

In June 2004, Artstor initiated a year-long pilot of its proposed institutional hosting service. This service will enable local institutional collections to be hosted by Artstor and served back to the participating institution alongside Artstor’s Charter Collection, and using Artstor’s software environment and tools. Ten colleges and universities have been working with Artstor to assess the usefulness of this service to institutions, as well as to evaluate the financial and organizational impact of hosting at each institution.

The Artstor user community has expressed a great deal of interest and enthusiasm about the hosting service for several reasons: (1) hosting will allow institutions to supplement the images in Artstor’s Charter Collection with additional images that meet the specific needs of an institution and its professors; (2) all hosted images will be retrieved via Artstor’ tools and software, which means that local collections can utilize the searching, browsing, and zooming capabilities of the Artstor software; (3) for many institutions, hosting will also provide organizational benefits, since Artstor’s underlying database can function as a useful tool for the campus-wide management of images and data.

The ten institutions involved in the pilot, which include universities and colleges, were chosen for their diversity in the type of institutional collections, the size of those collections, and the media on which those institutional collections are stored. While some institutions elected to host art-related collections, many have contributed collections that represent a wide range of departments and disciplines, including biology, astronomy, maps of Africa, and Cuban Heritage objects.

Over the course of assessing the pilot, we are gathering data from institutions about current practices in image collection-building and management, and asking participants about the pedagogical impact of having local collections made more widely accessible alongside the Artstor collections. Artstor is working with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) and seven NITLE-member colleges on the formal assessment of the hosting pilot. NITLE has provided these colleges with funds to access Artstor for the length of the pilot, and Artstor is working with these schools to assess the financial and organizational impact of institutional collection hosting in an educational environment.

The hosting pilot project is scheduled to run through the summer. Once the results are complied and reviewed we will be announcing the next steps.

The institutions currently participating in the pilot are:

  • Bryn Mawr College
  • Denison University
  • DePauw University
  • Emory University
  • Grinnell College
  • Sewanee: The University of the South
  • Stanford University
  • University of Miami
  • Washington and Lee University
  • Williams College

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April 12, 2004

Artstor Announces Availability Of Digital Image Resource

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.

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