Monmouth College to offer ARTstor digital library
Release Date: January 10, 2005
MONMOUTH, Ill. — Students, faculty and researchers at Monmouth
College can now access online approximately 300,000 visual images
and related catalog data through ARTstor, a non-profit initiative
with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship,
teaching and learning in the arts and other fields.
Initiated at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARTstor is available
to non-profit cultural and educational institutions. The ARTstor
Digital Library is composed of digital images and their
corresponding data, tools to make active use of those images and an
online environment designed to balance the interests of users with
those of content providers.
ARTstor documents artistic and historical traditions across many
time periods and cultures and focuses on, but is not limited to, the
arts. As a campus-wide resource, ARTstor is designed to be used by
researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images, as well
as by art historians.
“ARTstor is a valuable addition to the digital resources available
through our library,”
said Rick Sayre, director of the college’s Hewes Library. “ARTstor
provides the Monmouth College community with a wider range of visual
materials for educational and scholarly use and broader access to
images of important art, architecture, design and archaeological
objects.”
ARTstor’s Charter Collection contains approximately 300,000 digital
images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines,
and seeks to offer sufficient breadth and depth to support a wide
range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities. The
collection has been derived from several source collections that are
the product of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic
archives, publishers, slide libraries and individual scholars. These
source collections include The Image Gallery, the Carnegie Arts of
the United States, the Huntington Archive of Asian Art, The
Illustrated Bartsch, the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive and
the MoMA Architecture and Design Collection.
ARTstor’s proprietary software tools enable users to view and
analyze images through features such as zooming and panning, and to
save groups of images for personal or group uses, as well as for use
in lectures and other presentation, either on- or off-line.
According to James Shulman, executive director of ARTstor, “The
impact of digitization on teaching and scholarship becomes
increasingly clear every day. ARTstor is working with museums,
colleges, universities, libraries, archives and others around the
world in an effort to ensure that these dramatic changes happen in
thoughtful ways. We are excited by the chance to play a role in a
community-wide effort to provide access to a growing collection of
images representing many aspects of the world’s collective cultural
heritage.”
More information about ARTstor is available at www.artstor.org
http://www.artstor.org.
Released
by the Office of College Communications
Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications
Phone: 309-457-2117
Fax: 309-457-2330
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