CHArt Twenty-First Annual Conference

Max Marmor, ARTstor, USA.
ARTstor, a digital library for the history of art and the humanities

ARTstor (www.artstor.org) is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the history of art and associated fields. The roots of ARTstor, as well as its name, can be traced to the Foundation's earlier creation of JSTOR (www.jstor.org). JSTOR's goal is to serve libraries and the scholarly community by building, making available, and preserving a reliable and comprehensive archive of important scholarly journal literature. The JSTOR archive now includes many key journals in the history of art and architecture, such as the Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine and the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

In March 1999, the Foundation began to explore ways in which it might help address community-wide needs for accessing and using images for non-commercial, educational and scholarly purposes. What digital resources do curators, educators, scholars, students, and others need to do their work more effectively and in new ways? How can the adoption of evolving standards and best practices in this domain be fostered? Where do the interests of various parts of the arts community overlap and how can different interests be addressed regarding the development and use of digital collections? Above all, how can work in this arena be developed, sustained and funded?

ARTstor's primary goals as an organization are: to assemble image collections from across many time periods and cultures that will, in the aggregate, have sufficient depth, breadth, and coherence to support a wide range of educational and scholarly activities; to create an organized, central, and reliable digital resource that supports the non-commercial use of images for research, teaching and learning.

As an expanding digital library offering (even at this early date) hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data, ARTstor seeks to provide scholars, teachers, and students with the kinds of image collections and software tools they need to make the pivotal transition from slides to digital images.

As an online resource available only to non-profit institutions, ARTstor seeks to create a secure, trustworthy space on the Internet for the educational, non-commercial use of digital images. This space is defined by a licensing framework that embraces - and seeks to accommodate the concerns and interests of - content owners, participating institutions and end users.

As a non-profit organization with roots in both higher education and the museum community, ARTstor strives to bring the international community of archives, libraries, and museums together around a set of shared values and common goals focused on teaching and learning. Essential to this effort is a commitment to identifying, understanding, and balancing the concerns and interests of content and rights owners with those of end users and those who represent them in a variety of institutional settings.

ARTstor became an independent non-profit organization in January 2004, and began offering a service in July of that year. In its first year of serving the educational and cultural communities nearly 400 colleges, universities, art schools, and museums in the United States have chosen to participate. In April 2005, ARTstor announced its availability in Canada, the beginning of an international outreach program.

This presentation will offer an overview of ARTstor's mission and genesis to date, a demonstration of ARTstor's collections, software and services, and a look ahead at the future, including prospects for availability in the UK.

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