Artstor

Christine Kuan (ARTstor) 7 augustus 2011 (n.a.v bijeenkomst RKD)

Below I include some background information about ARTstor, and please also see the Contributor’s Guide for more detailed information about contributing collections as well as the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program: www.artstor.org/collections.

Background

ARTstor (www.artstor.org) is a nonprofit digital image library that shares more than 1.3 million images in the arts and sciences. Initiated by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001, we have been an independent nonprofit charity organization since 2003. ARTstor currently serves hundreds of thousands of curators, scholars, teachers, and students at over 1,350 museums and educational institutions in 45 countries worldwide (see: http://www.artstor.org/interested-in-participation/i-html/current-participants.shtml). We are a community-built, community-supported online resource and the images are available strictly for noncommercial scholarly and educational uses. We work with the community to share a variety of superlative collections from museums, scholars, professional photographers, universities, libraries, photo archives, and artists and artists’ estates. These include: Berlin State Museums, Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), Magnum Photos, MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, Bodleian Library (University of Oxford), and others (www.artstor.org/collections).  

Promoting your museum

ARTstor Digital Library publicizes important new collection collaborations on our public website homepage banners (see www.artstor.org) and through a variety of channels, including: monthly email announcements that reach more than 80,000 individuals; newsletters; and various web presences (ARTstor Blog, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). We have found many museums today want to reach educational users, and ARTstor is a great non-exclusive channel (in addition to everything else that is possible online) for growing the current and next generation’s interest in your collections. We also include rights contact information and URLs in each image record to link ARTstor users back to the Museum (and we can also include a link to any commercial partner), so that they may be in touch directly regarding reproduction requests and other licensing opportunities. We also provide customized reports of the usage statistics for your collection on an annual basis, so that you may quantify how your collection is being used by educational users around the world. Many museums are now adding their ARTstor usage statistics to their other Web statistics to demonstrate their overall presence on the Web.

How to contribute digital images

It is free to contribute images to ARTstor, and we provide hard drives and cover the shipping charges for loading and sending digital images/data to ARTstor. Contributors receive free access to their own collections in the Digital Library, and there is special museum pricing for museums who wish to subscribe to the entire Digital Library. We also perform legal review on every image so that the Museum would not have to determine which images can be shared online. We have standing agreements with many rights agencies in the United States and in Europe (e.g. ARS, VAGA, Bildkunst of Germany, Beeldrecht of the Netherlands, BONO of Norway, BUS of Sweden, Copydan of Denmark, DACS of the United Kingdom, Prolitteris of Switzerland, SIAE of Italy, VEGAP of Spain, and SABAM of Belgium). Images that are contributed to ARTstor are shared for strictly non-exclusive, educational, non-commercial uses and the museum would retain all rights to use the images for other commercial and non-commercial purposes.