ARTstor, eight partner colleges and universities, and the Society of Architectural Historians have embarked upon a new initiative for the management and sharing of digital images called “Shared Shelf.”  The institutional partners include Colby College, Cornell University, Harvard University, Middlebury College, New York University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami, and Yale University.  Harvard and Yale are serving as lead partners.  The project intends to make it practical for institutions, large and small, to combine images created by individuals, those held by the institution, and those in ARTstor’s database — and to do so without the need for local on-site infrastructure.

Partners are contributing significant staff knowledge and time, in addition to investment funds, and ARTstor is developing the common software platform.  The goal is to create an efficient and innovative infrastructure informed by the shared expertise of key participating institutions.

James Shulman, President of ARTstor, acknowledged the value of the partnership to ARTstor’s efforts to serve the educational community.  “Working with such experienced partners will help to build a system to unlock images from archives all around the campus as well as from scholars’ own collections.  ARTstor’s collections are a good starting point, but a platform that enables all of us to standardize and share material promises to be both efficient and effective.”

The initiative will enable institutions to build, manage, access and share visual content across their own campuses, with other campuses — or, in the case of the Society of Architectural Historians, across a geographically distributed community of scholars.  Because the platform will enable institutions to integrate their own images with ARTstor’s digital image library (of more than one million images) and also allow campuses to share content in a range of ways, the platform will facilitate the expansion of a trusted and collaborative network of institutions, and their individual users.  The project also aims to lower institutions’ costs in supporting the management of image collections by developing a common infrastructure upon which this content can be stored and accessed.

The project has developed from ARTstor’s pilot “hosting” program, which now includes almost two million images from 130 colleges, universities, and museums.  Each institution’s images are served back to the institution (or consortium) via ARTstor’s online library platform, and each institution’s images are seamlessly integrated and cross-searchable with ARTstor’s own collections.  This ability to bring together institutional and ARTstor collections has been very valuable to scholars and teachers in many different academic fields.

During the past year, the Society of Architectural Historians and ARTstor launched the first use of Shared Shelf, called SAHARA (The Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive www.saharaonline.org).  SAHARA allows SAH members to upload their own images and metadata to their own shared online archive as well as to download the shared images for teaching and research. Commenting on the transformative nature of SAHARA, SAH Executive Director Pauline Saliga stated:  “The leadership and members of the Society are excited about the potential of this user-contributed, shared online academic resource.  Our expectation is that it will dramatically change the way we do research in the field of architectural history by providing vast amounts of data and thousands of images that can be used to provide comparative examples, test theories, and challenge our common wisdom about both world monuments and the ordinary buildings of our everyday lives.”

Perspectives from Institutional Partners:

• Clem Guthro, Director of the Libraries at Colby College noted, “As a small college, we need to support users across the curriculum as simply as possible and without a lot of specialized staff to assist them.  We believe that this platform will manage the complexity behind the scenes and let our small staff do what we do best — catalog content and serve users.”

• “Since Cornell has been working on digital image management for a long time,” University Librarian Anne Kenney noted, “we have tried a lot of approaches. The key for Cornell was the ability to marry our local need to support the curriculum with a single system that provides access to vetted resources, supports individual contributions, and allows us to broadly share images with our partner institutions and the world.”

• For decision-makers at Harvard, where an infrastructure for image management and use for 21 different departments was implemented in the 1990s, the partnership was attractive because of the joint investment that will update the cataloging systems and leverage protocols enabling interoperation with authority files, repository and discovery environments.  “Images are becoming ever more important in both teaching and research.  As a community we have lacked good tools for their management and discovery.”  Dale Flecker, Associate Director for Planning and Systems, Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems noted.  “Images present significant challenges.  Having worked with ARTstor for years in this domain, we believe that combining forces and know-how offers the most promising approach to these challenges.”

• Mike Roy, Dean of Library and Information Services, Chief Information Officer and Librarian at Middlebury added, “Even on our relatively small campus, we have many different systems for managing digital collections and none of these systems talk very well to each other or to the rest of the world. In tough budgetary times, that neither makes good fiscal sense nor allows our users to get the most out of the diverse image collections that we’re building.”

• At NYU, library staff anticipate that participation in the program will not only integrate collections (from the Institute of Fine Arts, the art history department downtown, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and the libraries) but also will reduce infrastructure support costs.  “Managing separate servers and different applications for each unit in order to provide image resources to our community is not practical, efficient or desirable.  We can no longer expend time and resources in this manner. We need an enterprise solution,” Roddy Austin, Director of Information Technology and Media Services for the Division of Libraries.  “By creating Shared Shelf on a ‘Software as a Service’ model, ARTstor and the partnership will take on the infrastructure headaches that we require to be well managed, but don’t want to manage ourselves.”

• The University of Illinois Library and its College of Fine and Applied Arts are spearheading an effort focused on supporting the needs of scholars across campus whose work depends upon their ability to find and utilize high quality visual information in the context of research and learning.  “The ARTstor Shared Shelf initiative provides Illinois scholars with access to unique local treasures and globally-renowned collections of visual resources in one flexible and powerful environment” comments Beth Sandore, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Planning and Policy and Associate Dean of Libraries. “By working with ARTstor in partnership with colleagues at other institutions, we see the potential to emerge with a service that unites locally distributed image management functions in a scalable and standards-driven system, with the added benefit of the accumulated knowledge from our colleagues at other institutions and at ARTstor.  We believe all the ingredients are present for a much stronger product to emerge from this collaboration.”

• Bill Walker, Dean of the Library at the University of Miami, noted “For the past four years, University of Miami faculty have depended on ARTstor’s hosting program, which allows them to integrate their images with the rich ARTstor collection in the classroom.  The availability of images through one central service gives students and faculty a “one-stop shopping” resource for research, teaching and learning across the curriculum.  Additionally, hosting services, combined with ARTstor, have allowed Miami to make unique holdings, such as the digital assets from UM’s Cuban Heritage Collection, available to an international audience, and we are investing in Shared Shelf to make the University’s resources even more visible.”

• Meg Bellinger, Director of Yale University’s Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure, noted that “A 2004 Mellon Foundation grant encouraged the libraries, archives, and museums on campus to further develop collaborative projects — across their traditional domains of practice — to better support teaching, research, and the preservation of collections.  Bringing these groups together to support Shared Shelf is a natural next step.   The initiative will allow us to build upon that collaborative spirit to encourage the crossing of disciplinary or operational boundaries.”

With input from a committee of current hosting institutions, as well as from the Shared Shelf partners, design and development of the platform is underway.  The new Shared Shelf initiative anticipates a launch — as a fee-based service — by January 2011.

Updates on Shared Shelf are available by writing to ARTstor at sharedshelf@artstor.org.  The partners and ARTstor will also report on progress and future directions throughout the year at library, scholarly meetings, and community fora.

ARTstor is collaborating with Esto Photographics to digitize and distribute images of modern architecture from the archive of Ezra Stoller (1915 – 2004), who is widely recognized as the leading American architectural photographer of the 20th century. A recent release of more than 5,800 images is now available in the Digital Library. This set includes buildings designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, Pietro Belluschi, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Bunshaft, Arthur Charles Erickson, Ulrich Joseph Franzen, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Morris Lapidus, I. M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, Hugh Asher Stubbins, Jr., Kenzo Tange, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others.

Stoller founded Esto Photographics Inc. in 1966 as an architectural photo agency. Now directed by his daughter Erica Stoller, Esto arranges photography assignments for collaborating architectural photographers. The agency collaborates with VIEW Pictures in the UK and with archenova in Germany, stock agencies concentrating on images of architecture. Esto also manages a comprehensive stock photography archive relating to architecture, interior design, antiques, folk art, and Americana with images contributed by more than 100 photographers. Esto has partnered with ARTstor to share two important collections from the stock archive, those of Ezra Stoller and of Wayne Andrews, in the Digital Library for scholarly and academic uses.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Ezra Stoller Archive (Esto) collection page.

Related collections:

• Wayne Andrews: Architecture (Esto)
• Architecture and Design Collection (Museum of Modern Art)
• Contemporary Architecture, Urban Design, and Public Art (ART on FILE Collection)
• QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (Columbia University)
• Wilfried Wang: Modern Architecture (University of Texas at Austin)

ARTstor has collaborated with the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin to distribute the Christopher Long collection of more than 200 images of Central European architecture. These images have been digitized from slides housed in the School of Architecture’s Visual Resources Collection and created by Christopher Long. Architecture is represented from Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, mainly from the 18th through 20th centuries, and includes buildings designed by Josef Chochol, Karl Ehn, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Joseph Gočár, Josef Hoffmann, Pavel Janák, Emil Králíček, Adolf Loos, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Otto Wagner, among others.

Christopher Long, Associate Professor for Architectural History at the School of Architecture, specializes in the history of modern architecture, with an emphasis on Central Europe from 1800 to the present; his interests also include modern design in Central and Eastern Europe.

For more detailed information about this collection, please see the Christopher Long collection page.

Related Collections:

• Wilfried Wang: Modern Architecture (School of Architecture)
• Wayne Andrews: Architecture (Esto)
• Dov Friedman: American and European Architecture
• Contemporary Architecture, Urban Design, and Public Art (ART on FILE Collection)
• Ezra Stoller Archive (Esto)

ARTstor has partnered with ART on FILE to document contemporary architecture in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The photography for the most recent campaign concluded in June 2009. ARTstor sponsored this campaign to create new, direct-digital photographs of buildings, built-environment projects, and landscape architecture in a number of cities, including Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and surrounding areas, as well as Malmo, Sweden. Professional photographers Colleen Chartier and Rob Wilkinson have documented the works of MvRdV, Henning Larsen, Jean Nouvel, Santiago Calatrava, 3XN, de Architekten Cie., Foster & Partners, Steven Holl, Wilkinson Eyre, Toyo Ito, Neutelings Riediijk, Lundgaard & Tranberg, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Jorn Utzon, Rafael Vinoly, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Grimshaw Architects, Zaha Hadid, and numerous others.

These new photographs will join the approximately 9,600 images by ART on FILE already in the Digital Library. Chartier and Wilkinson have contributed selections from ART on FILE’s remarkable archive of slides and transparencies, which documents contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and public art around the world. ARTstor has also sponsored previous campaigns for ART on FILE to create new digital photographs of contemporary architecture in the United States and Europe (Berlin, London, Barcelona, and Madrid).

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Contemporary Architecture, Urban Design, and Public Art (ART on FILE Collection) page.

Related Collections:

• Ezra Stoller Archive (Esto)
• Wayne Andrews: Architecture (Esto)
• Architecture and Design Collection (Museum of Modern Art)
• QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (Columbia University)
• Ralph Lieberman: Architectural Photography
• Wilfried Wang: Modern Architecture (University of Texas at Austin)
• Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts

The Spring 2009 edition of the ARTstor Newsletter is now available on our website and includes articles on the following:

• Celebrating One Million Images: An overview of collection growth showcasing the diversity and excellence of our content contributors
• New Collection Agreements & Releases: Highlights of some of the most recent collection releases and agreements to contribute new collections to the Digital Library
• Technology Timeline: Traces the 5-year development of ARTstor technologies
• Participant Viewpoint: Rochester Institute of Technology Libraries’ strategy for supporting ARTstor participation

The ARTstor Newsletter is available online as a printable PDF

This July ARTstor celebrates five years of serving the educational and arts communities. Since the Digital Library’s launch in 2004 with 300,000 images ARTstor collections have grown to include more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Today ARTstor enables a wide range of users—curators, scholars, educators, librarians, and students—to teach and study with breathtaking cultural objects, seminal architectural works, as well as a broad range of historical, political, social, economic, and cultural documentation from prehistory to the present in a single online workspace. To this end we continue to develop new collaborative projects with content contributors, and explore and develop technologies that will aid in the discovery, presenting, and sharing of the Digital Library content across our community of users.

To read more about ARTstor’s first five years, please see our most recent newsletter, Volume 12.

Approximately 1,200 images of Renaissance and Baroque book illustrations from the Warburg Institute are now available in the ARTstor Digital Library. This first release includes images of European book illustrations from the 16th through 18th centuries, selected from the rare book collection housed at the Warburg Institute Library.

The Warburg Institute was founded in 1921 and supports research in all aspects of western civilization, including art, architecture, language, literature, religion, science, philosophy, social customs, and political institutions. The Institute maintains a library of over 350,000 volumes, a photographic collection of over 300,000 images, and an archive.

To view The Warburg Institute collection: go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click “The Warburg Institute”; or enter the Keyword Search: “warburg institute library”.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Warburg Institute collection page.

Related collections:

• The Illustrated Bartsch
• Vesalius Anatomical Illustrations (Northwestern University)

More than 2,700 images of archaeological sites and architectural monuments from Bryn Mawr College are now available in the Digital Library. This first release for the Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College) collection includes site plans of architectural monuments and archaeological sites in Europe and the Ancient Near East, particularly sites located in modern-day Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey.

To view the Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College) collection: go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click “Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College)”; or enter the Keyword Search: plans brynmawr.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College) collection page.

Related collections:

• Historic Illustrations of Art and Architecture (Minneapolis College of Art and Design)
• Classical Antiquity Lantern Slide Collection (Bryn Mawr College)
• Mellink Archive (Bryn Mawr College)
• Giza Archaeological Expedition Archive (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• The Yale University Art Gallery and the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale University)
• Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Canyonlights World Art Image Bank)

ARTstor is collaborating with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to share more than 600 images of European paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955) made an initial gift of nearly 400 primarily Italian paintings and sculptures to the National Gallery of Art before the museum opened in 1941. The Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art today consists of works of European art from the 13th through the 18th centuries, including paintings, sculptures, medals, prints, drawings, and decorative arts, as well as an important collection of historical picture frames.

Artists represented in the National Gallery of Art collection in ARTstor will include: Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, François Boucher, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Hieronymus Bosch, Sandro Botticelli, Agnolo Bronzino, Canaletto, Jean Siméon Chardin, Petrus Christus, François Clouet, Piero di Cosimo, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jacques-Louis David, Donatello, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Albrecht Dürer, Anthony van Dyck, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Giorgione, Giotto, Francisco de Goya, El Greco, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Mantegna, Simone Martini, Hans Memling, Nicolas Poussin, Pontormo, Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Luca Signorelli, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Jacopo Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, Antoine Watteau, and many others.

The National Gallery of Art is one of the world’s pre-eminent museums. The permanent collection currently includes approximately 114,000 works, which trace the development of Western art from the medieval period to the present.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the National Gallery of Art collection page.

ARTstor and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) have announced a collaboration through which the CPPC will share hundreds of images of colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin American art through the ARTstor Digital Library. The partnership will broaden educational and scholarly access to these important works, which include examples by such major artists as Helio Oiticica, Tomás Maldonado, Lygia Pape, and Joaquín Torres-Garcia. These images augment ARTstor’s representation of Latin America, a rapidly growing area of research and teaching in dozens of disciplines, including the visual arts, world history, politics, and economics.

Announcing the collaboration, Neil Rudenstine, chairman of the ARTstor Board of Trustees, said, “The Colección Patricia Phelps Cisneros is a remarkable creation, dedicated to a greater worldwide understanding of the treasure of Latin American art. Enabling ARTstor to include these works in its Digital Library is not only a generous act in itself, but one that will be invaluable to the thousands of students, faculty, and others who use ARTstor for educational purposes in many parts of the world.”

The CPPC is the core visual-arts program of the Fundación Cisneros, a private philanthropic organization committed to improving education in Latin America and increasing global awareness of the breadth of Latin America’s contributions to world culture. Founded by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo A. Cisneros, in association with the Cisneros Group of Companies, the Fundación Cisneros builds innovative programs and partnerships with international reach. The CPPC was established to advance scholarship on Latin American art, promote excellence in visual-arts education, and encourage a high level of expertise among Latin American art professionals. It achieves these goals through exhibitions, publications, scholarly research, online access, grants, and multifaceted education programs.

The nonprofit ARTstor Digital Library comprises one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences, along with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching purposes. The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools.

For additional information about the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, contact Lucy O’Brien, Jeanne Collins & Associates, LLC, New York City, 646-486-7050 or info@jcollinsassociates.com.

For additional information about ARTstor, contact User Services, 212-500-2400, or userservices@artstor.org