Art research: a digital future?

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Stephanie Cash

A new on-line digital art library, Artstor, finally launched this summer. The $30-million project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and headed by Nell Rudenstine, former president of Harvard University. The service is available to nonprofit educational and cultural institutions in the United States. Usage fees vary according to the size and type of the subscriber institution, and range from $600 to $20,000 per year, after front-end fees of $500 to $40,000.

In test runs, the technology has significantly reduced instructors' preparation time for gathering visual material, which often means hours of pulling slides. The richness of photographic detail has also proved beneficial for academic research. With some 300,000 images currently on-line, the collection is expected to grow to half a million by summer 2006. A large cache of material came from the University of California, San Diego, because its slides were already digitized. Artstor also features material from existing compilations of images from art-history texts and specialized collections of American and Asian art, as well as from the Museum of Modern Art's architecture and design collection. The Mellon Foundation is providing funds to photograph mural paintings and sculptures from Buddhist cave shrines in China. Artstor plans to beef up its modern and contemporary art selections once copyright issues are addressed.

While praising Artstor as a great addition to existing resources, some professionals express doubt that it will ever replace current methods, especially since slide libraries are often tailored to suit local needs and Artstor's repository is admittedly far from comprehensive. Though the fees have been called formidable by art-slide library standards, Artstor is intended to be a campus-wide service and will not likely come from departmental budgets. And, because of copyright issues, there are restrictions. Images cannot be used for commercial purposes or included in noncommercial material that might be widely distributed. Users are typically on-line during presentations or lectures, which raises the specter of potential server or connection problems. Low-resolution images can be downloaded for use off-site (or to avoid technical glitches), but only with Artstor's proprietary viewing tool.

The venture is similar to another Web-based image service geared toward visual art. The Art Museum Image Consortium (Amico) contains 100,000 images from the collections of its member institutions. Amico will be shutting down next year; some of its material will be acquired by Artstor, which has a broader reach and deeper pockets, thanks to the Mellon.