MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at 847-491-4890 or w-leopold@northwestern.edu

January 25, 2005

ARTstor Opens New World of Art History

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Remember Art History 101 — the darkened classroom, the illuminated dust particles and the thunk of the slide projector announcing each new image on a pull-down screen?

An online repository of world art images called ARTstor is poised to render that time-honored slide show as out-of-date as the long-playing record. More important, the new and ever growing collection of digital images has the potential to revolutionize the ways in which art history and other subjects are taught and studied by bringing art and humanities collections around the world to home, library and office computers.

“It’s the future,” said Jessica Rowe, who is in the middle of an art history department project to digitize 10,000 slides of images not in ARTstor. “ARTstor doesn’t yet cover the needs for an entire class, but it’s an incredible resource,” she said. A winter quarter class on ancient art, for example, will draw numerous images of Roman and Greek art from ARTstor.

A professor can make a class presentation of both ARTstor images and personally selected, digitized slides either online or off. An offline image viewer – a kind of slide show creation program that is part of ARTstor — allows professors to download into the presentation tool the high resolution ARTstor images they choose and upload selected images from their own computers. The result is a static, saved collection of images for class presentation using a digital slide projector and ARTstor software.

Later, on their home computers and in the comfort of their dormitories, students can reexamine and study the images that they previously viewed in class.

Since July 2004, ARTstor, a non-profit organization initiated and financed by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has made available 300,000 digital images of world art, architecture and design to subscribing educational institutions and museums.  It already has more than 200 subscribers.

The images were part of seven very significant collections, including the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design Collection, the Huntington Archive of Asian Art and, of particular interest to Northwestern, the hitherto unseen Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA).

MIDA is the product of a multinational effort to create high-quality digital reconstructions of the mural paintings and related art and texts associated with hundreds of Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China. Northwestern’s Sarah Fraser, associate professor of art history in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, provided important scholarly guidance and oversight for the project.

Fraser worked with a team of Northwestern media specialists to photograph the largely inaccessible art that can be seen in MIDA. As someone who has spent years traveling to do her research, she fully understands the potential for study and scholarship that Internet access to art from around the world offers students and scholars. Like ARTstor, MIDA was supported by funding from The Mellon Foundation.

ARTstor <www.artstor.org> is made available through University Library to any member of the Northwestern University community with access to the University server and to visitors to University Library using library computers.

The searchable image repository — which is expected to grow to a half million images by 2006 — offers faculty and students alike the opportunity to bring up an image in seconds, focus on a small detail of an artwork to, say, examine its brushwork, or compare art works side by side.

The digital database allows faculty members to make written comments next to images that can either be shared by class members or saved for personal use. Students, too, can annotate the images with their comments and questions. Users can search a specific collection or all collections for the works of a single artist or of a particular art movement and download the results into personalized, customized image groups.

“What’s really exciting about ARTstor is they’re signing all sorts of new contracts to digitize all kinds of collections that can be used by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines,” said Russell Clement, head of University Library’s art collection.

Upon learning that ARTstor was going to purchase the rights to digitize an extensive collection of African maps owned by Stanford University, Clement raced to the Herskovits Library to spread the good news for Africana specialists. Unfortunately, the deal with Stanford has yet to be sealed.

Plans are underway to digitize 36,000 photographic images documenting the activities and experiences of women in the 19th and 20th centuries from Harvard’s unparalleled Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and to make available 25,000 images of Islamic art and architecture from important private collections.

It also will include 30,000 images from Harvard’s Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Spanning nearly 5,000 years and documenting virtually all artistic media, the Institute’s Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive is an unprecedented research initiative devoted to the ways in which people of African descent have been perceived and represented in art.

Having access to such images should prove invaluable for scholars and students of multiple disciplines, including history, women’s studies, African American studies, art history and religion.

In January, ARTstor subscribers learned that 15 art museums have committed to share digital image collections and associated material through ARTstor. Among them are The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

These art museum partnerships will result in the sharing of tens of thousands of very high quality digital images — images carefully selected by museum curators representing both well-known masterpieces and thousands of works of art that deserve to be better known.

Many of the hidden treasures of major art museums  — including the textiles, photographs, and works on paper that are typically too fragile to be on regular public view — will be available for study.

Martin Mueller, professor of English, is contemplating the ways that students in his Shakespeare class could make use of ARTstor. Fraser will use it when she teaches a course on Buddhist thought in the spring.

The concept of making art available on the Internet is not a new one, and Microsoft wizard Bill Gates himself is in the process of overseeing the creation of an extensive image archive. What makes ARTstor different is the fact that it digitizes full collections and selects images not for their profit potential but for their educational value. As a result, ARTstor includes and will continue to digitize images that are unlikely to be part of a commercial collection but of importance to scholars and students.

ARTstor’s arrival has been met enthusiastically by librarians and the technologically savvy. But like most technology changes, it will take time for some users to adopt it. Jessica Rowe in art history is working with professors and teaching assistants to make using ARTstor less difficult for the uninitiated.

ARTstor welcomes its subscribers’ suggestions and considers its launch “not a resting point (but) the beginning of a great deal of work that needs to be done.” In other words, says Clement, it is a work in progress. In a few years, he expects to see not only a more consistent standard for high quality images but also new ways to use the digital image repository.

One exciting pilot project underway will allow 10 individual institutions to store and share locally created digital files with others or to host them on ARTstor and restrict access to their own users. Another is exploring how ARTstor can be used in primary and secondary education.

For now, ARTstor undoubtedly will live and work side-by-side with the specialized slide collections that have been carefully developed by scholars over many years. As technology improves, online image collections grow and users come to increasingly rely on ready accessibility and content, initiatives such as ARTstor promise to become standard resources.

Shortly before ARTstor’s 2004 launch, Kodak announced without fanfare that it no longer would be in the business of making slide projectors. Good thing that, as one library journal pointed out, ARTstor has the earmarks of becoming the standard online image resource.