Subject: ARTSTOR Announced by Mellon Foundation
NINCH-ANNOUNCE (david@ninch.org)
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 13:34:15 -0400
Message-Id: <v04210101b6f8f2d8e418@[192.100.21.23]> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 13:34:15 -0400 To: ninch-announce@cni.org From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> Subject: ARTSTOR Announced by Mellon Foundation
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
April 10, 2001
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Announces ArtSTOR
http://www.mellon.org/artstor%20announcement.html
[From the Mellon Foundation Website:]
April 5, 2001
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced today that it is
undertaking a significant new initiative by sponsoring the formation
of "ArtSTOR," an independent not-for-profit organization that will
develop, "store," and distribute electronically digital images and
related scholarly materials for the study of art, architecture, and
other fields in the humanities. The Foundation also announced that
Neil L. Rudenstine will lead an advisory group that is being
established to guide the development of the new entity and will chair
its board when it is formally established. James L. Shulman will
serve as executive director of ArtSTOR.
ArtSTOR's mission will be to provide access to high quality digital
images and other relevant materials for teachers, students and
scholars at educational and cultural institutions. The new
organization intends to develop collections of these digital
materials and related information that will be broad and deep enough
to meet a range of objectives. ArtSTOR also aims to reduce costs for
participating institutions by eliminating the need for each entity or
institution to create its own core archive. In addition, ArtSTOR
will address issues of sustainability. At present, it is often
difficult for scholars and institutions that develop valuable digital
archives to maintain them and make them available under appropriate
safeguards.
In negotiating the numerous legal and technical issues it will
encounter as it establishes digital collections of images and related
materials, ArtSTOR will benefit greatly from the leadership of Mr.
Rudenstine, who will assume the duties of chairman, on a half-time
basis, after leaving the presidency of Harvard on July 1 of this
year.
Mr. Rudenstine will work with the Mellon Foundation's president,
William G. Bowen, and with Mr. Shulman to develop criteria for
determining ArtSTOR's content, the architecture of the database,
policies governing intellectual property rights, the method for
distributing the content to users in the educational and cultural
worlds, and a business plan ensuring sustainability of the project.
ArtSTOR is in the process of applying for status as an independent
501(c)(3) public charity; in the interim it is being developed as a
project of the Mellon Foundation.
"All of us at the Mellon Foundation are simply delighted that
President Rudenstine has agreed to make such a substantial commitment
of his time and talent to the development of the ArtSTOR concept,"
said Mr. Bowen. "Having worked closely with Neil Rudenstine over
more than 20 years at Princeton and at the Mellon Foundation, I know
what an extraordinarily insightful and effective leader he is. I
believe that his knowledge of the humanities and of art history, his
exceptional organizational skills, and his familiarity with leading
scholars in the field qualify him superbly to guide the development
of this new scholarly resource that has such potential to enhance and
even alter the study of art. He and James Shulman will make a highly
effective team, and I look forward with keen anticipation to working
with them."
In his own statement, Mr. Rudenstine stresses that: "The formation
of ArtSTOR represents a significant technological advance that will
strengthen our capacity to study the field of art and many
neighboring fields. We all recognize that there is no substitute for
direct engagement with original works of art or for actual archival
study. But the special opportunities presented by digital
technologies constitute the most fundamental development in the
potential for increased access and flexibility of use since the
advent of photographic reproduction. Achieving ArtSTOR's objectives
will take considerable time and resources. It will also depend
critically upon the advice and collaboration of many individuals and
organizations whose experience and knowledge will be invaluable. The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is uniquely suited, by its tradition and
the interests of its founders, to develop this new initiative. It
also has, in William Bowen, an outstanding president with whom I have
worked as a close colleague since the late 1960s, and in James
Shulman, a person with the executive leadership skills that ArtSTOR
will need. I am very enthusiastic about the prospect ahead."
One of ArtSTOR's first major projects will be the construction of an
image "gallery" that will facilitate the teaching of art history
courses, both in the US and abroad. It is anticipated that scholars
and students with access to the database via campus networks will be
able to use its high-quality images and carefully-documented
resources to enrich teaching and learning. The projected breadth of
ArtSTOR's collection of digital images is likely to make it useful
not only for students and teachers of art, but also for those
studying history, anthropology, literature, the classics, American
studies, and other disciplines.
"We hope that ArtSTOR will make it easier to teach from images in all
sorts of classes, not only in art history," Shulman noted.
"Moreover, while there are very few ways in which technology-or any
innovation-can change the basic process of solitary scholarship in
the humanities, I hope that ArtSTOR can introduce some new
possibilities. Neil's profound understanding of both the work of the
scholar and the workings of institutions will add so much to our
being able to realize ArtSTOR's potential."
In addition to creating a broadly conceived image gallery, ArtSTOR
will build and distribute electronically a number of deep scholarly
collections, including projects sponsored by Mellon as well as by
others. For example, in an initial pilot project, the Foundation has
worked with the Dunhuang Research Academy in China, scholars and
visual resource experts from Northwestern University, and a number of
leading libraries and museums worldwide to digitize images associated
with Buddhist cave grottoes in Dunhuang, China and now dispersed
throughout the world.
In creating the "Mellon International Dunhuang Archive," the
Foundation has learned much about how technology can change the ways
in which paintings, manuscripts, sculpture, and other objects can
best be recorded, accessed, presented, and archived. One objective
of the Dunhuang project is to "re-connect," virtually, the cave
paintings with numerous paintings, manuscripts, and textiles once at
Dunhuang but now dispersed in museums and libraries all over the
world. The Dunhuang project is an important demonstration of one
aspect of ArtSTOR's mission: to make accessible that which is either
difficult to access or (in many cases) entirely inaccessible.
A second pilot project is underway with the Museum of Modern Art in
conjunction with LUNA Imaging, Inc. based in Venice, California. The
digitization of over 6,000 works from the museum's design collection
will make these holdings available, for the first time and in
unprecedented ways, combining images of the highest resolution and
appropriate text with user interfaces and exceptionally flexible
search mechanisms. Many of these objects, which are of great
interest to scholars, are locked away in storage and thus not
normally available for study.
The high quality of the Digital Design Collection of MoMA will
characterize other ArtSTOR collections, in part as the result of an
agreement that the Mellon Foundation has reached to make wide use of
LUNA's Insight software which will provide Internet access to
collections through its advanced user environment for research and
teaching. In this and other ways, ArtSTOR expects to build upon
LUNA's accomplishments and the high standing that the company enjoys
within the academic and museum communities. Michael Ester, president
of LUNA Imaging, commented, "ArtSTOR should be able to ensure that
digital resources are available long-term for academic use while also
giving the owners of such materials confidence that their interests
are protected. It has extremely exciting potential as a safe haven
repository of cultural resources for research and education."
In working with content providers, the Foundation and ArtSTOR have
obtained perpetual, non-exclusive rights to aggregate such materials
and distribute them electronically for educational and scholarly
purposes. (The Foundation has retained the law firm of Cowan,
Liebowitz & Latman, PC to help address complex intellectual property
issues.) These agreements will allow ArtSTOR to serve as a
dependable repository for providing non-commercial access to visual
resources. In addition to serving the needs of teachers and
scholars, one goal of these projects is to support the mission of
institutions that seek to expand access to their own holdings for
academic audiences without incurring the financial and administrative
burdens of distribution.
The Mellon Foundation has long-standing interests in higher
education, the humanities, and the arts, and has made numerous grants
in these fields. In 2000, the Foundation awarded grants totaling
$220 million, with over 65 percent of these funds going to
institutions of higher education or to independent cultural
institutions (including museums and research libraries).
In 1995, the Foundation formed JSTOR, an independent not-for-profit
entity whose mission is to create a trusted archive of important
scholarly journals and to extend access to that archive to as many
scholars as possible. JSTOR currently includes the entire runs of
147 journals, and serves over 1,000 institutional subscribers in more
than 40 countries. While the initial capital costs of digitizing the
journals in JSTOR's database have been supported by grants from
Mellon, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, and the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation, the current
running costs of updating the database and providing access to it are
supported by fees paid by participating institutions. The lessons
learned through the development of JSTOR should be of great value in
establishing ArtSTOR. Also, the Foundation foresees a number of
possible points of intersection between JSTOR and ArtSTOR, including
potential linkages between art history journals and other scholarly
literature and digitized images in the ArtSTOR database.
A scholar of Renaissance literature, with longstanding interests in
art and architecture, Neil Rudenstine is the author of Sidney's
Poetic Development, the co-editor (with George S. Rousseau) of
English Poetic Satire: Wyatt to Byron, and the co-author (with
William G. Bowen) of In Pursuit of the PhD. A selection of his
speeches and writings as president of Harvard is soon to be published
as Pointing Our Thoughts: Reflections on Harvard and Higher Education
1991-2001. Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard, from which he
received his PhD in English, he was provost and professor of English
at Princeton University before serving as executive vice president of
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has served as president of
Harvard University and professor of English and American literature
and language since 1991.
In addition to assisting in the oversight of the Mellon Foundation's
endowment as the Foundation's financial and administrative officer,
James Shulman has served in research and program-related positions at
the Mellon Foundation since 1994. He is the co-author (with William
G. Bowen) of The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values,
the author of The Pale Cast of Thought: Hesitation and Decision in
the Renaissance Epic, and a collaborator on The Shape of the River:
Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University
Admissions (co-authored by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok). Shulman
received both his BA and his PhD in Renaissance Studies from Yale
University.
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