bob.chance@FURMAN.EDU on thu 5 apr 01
From: Bob Chance
Date: 5 April 2001
Subject: Mellon Digital Archive for Art and Architecture
I thought some of you might be interested in this article on digital art
images. This is not singularly about clay so you may want to hit delete
right NOW!
Foundation Will Create 'ArtSTOR,' a Digital Archive for Art and
Architecture
By FLORENCE OLSEN
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a plan on Wednesday to create a
comprehensive digital-slide
library of art and architecture for teaching and research.
Although many colleges and museums have begun digitizing images of items in
their own art collections, Mellon
plans to build a systematic collection of digital materials for teaching a
large range of core art-history courses.
"'Core' here doesn't necessarily mean traditional and stuffy," said James
L. Shulman, a financial and administrative
officer at the foundation who will become the executive director of
ArtSTOR, a nonprofit organization.
ArtSTOR's founders said they will first offer a set of images for the most
popular art-history courses on campuses,
among them courses in African and Islamic art.
Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard University's president, will be the chairman of
the project's advisory board until he
steps down from his Harvard post on July 1. Mr. Rudenstine will then become
board chairman of ArtSTOR. The
organization will expand digital art collections and license them for use
by colleges and cultural institutions
around the world.
While many museums and libraries around the country are engaged in
small-scale projects to digitize their own
collections of visual materials, scholars say no organizations have stepped
in to coordinate those activities in a
systematic way that would make those images accessible to many scholars and
students.
"What's created tends to stay where it is, and there isn't an established
standard for what level of image quality is
minimally acceptable," Mr. Rudenstine said.
Many art scholars have not benefited yet from the limited sources of
digital materials because the quality is
unacceptable, said Alan Wallach, a professor of art history and American
studies at the College of William and
Mary. "I can imagine endless uses for a 50,000-, 100,000-, or 500,000-image
digital archive."
But for now, Mr. Wallach said, he prefers his slide carousel for teaching
and scholarship. "The quality has not
gotten to the point where a projected digital image compares with a slide
image," he said.
In the mid-1990's, the Mellon Foundation provided the seed money for
another scholarly venture, JSTOR, which
became a self-sustaining, nonprofit library service. JSTOR, which stands
for "journal storage," created a
searchable database of out-of-print journals so that libraries that were
running out of space could store their back
issues. In doing so, JSTOR made the journals easily accessible to scholars
and preserved their content.
Eventually, ArtSTOR's visual contents will be linked to JSTOR's
scholarly-journal articles.
ArtSTOR will seek non-exclusive, royalty-free licenses to compile an
archive of digitized images and to
distribute those images internationally to nonprofit organizations for
educational and research purposes. "This is a
huge undertaking that we don't take on lightly," Mr. Shulman said.
Daniel Greenstein, the director of the Digital Library Federation, a group
of libraries interested in digital
technologies, described JSTOR and ArtSTOR as "community distribution
services." By providing such services,
he said, the Mellon Foundation can have "a significant impact on scholarly
culture."
Mellon has gained considerable digitizing experience already from several
pilot projects. One $1.7-million pilot
involves more than 6,000 items in the design collection of the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. Another is a
$3-million project to digitize and interpret 4th- to 14th-century Buddhist
art preserved in inaccessible caves in
Dunhuang, China. Mellon refers to these as "deep scholarly collections,"
which will be part of ArtSTOR, too.
"Although we all assume that in 20 years every image will be digitized,
right now it's still very costly to do," Mr.
Shulman said. ArtSTOR will use as sources a mix of slides, photographs, and
images taken with digital cameras.
"The quality of the photography really determines how much you're going to
be able to do with it," Mr. Shulman
said.
Executives of the project did not announce a date when the first ArtSTOR
services would be offered.
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