Artstor is a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than 2.5 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, and Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and image management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections.
Since 2003, the organization has been an independent non-profit 501(C)(3) organization based in New York. Starting in 2016, it joined in a strategic alliance with Ithaka Harbors, which currently operates the services JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R. [1]
In the late 1990s, as universities and libraries began to convert their slide libraries into local digital image databases, Artstor was created to address the growing need for a shared online image library that would be accessible to educational institutions worldwide. The Artstor Digital Library is intended to reduce redundant efforts of scanning and cataloging thousands of the same images from multiple repositories, and also to enable new digital image collections to be shared for teaching and research. The initiative paired innovative digital image and online technologies with Mellon Foundation's ongoing mission to support higher education, museums, the arts, and art conservation to “bring about a substantial transformation in art-related teaching, learning, and research.” [2]
In 2024, the Artstor platform and content became available as part of the JSTOR platform as part of JSTOR's broader multimedia content offerings. [3]
Artstor's primary goals as an organization are: to assemble image collections from across many time periods and cultures; to create an organized, central, and reliable digital resource that supports strictly non-commercial use of images for research, teaching and learning; and to work with the arts and educational communities to develop collective solutions for building, managing and sharing digital images for educational use. Like many non-profits, Artstor has a mixed business model; some services are provided on a fee basis (geared toward the size of the subscribing institution) and others are provided free of charge to the community.
The Artstor Digital Library includes a set of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching purposes. There are currently more than 1,500 Artstor institutional subscribers in over 45 countries, [4] including colleges and universities, museums, libraries, primary and secondary schools, and other non-profit organizations. The Artstor Digital Library offers a wide range of images needed for interdisciplinary teaching and research, including contributions from the leading museums, photo archives, libraries, scholars, photographers, artists, and artists’ estates. These diverse collections include: Magnum Photos, Carnegie Arts of the United States, The Illustrated Bartsch, the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, The Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Architecture and Design Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bodleian Library, and more. [5]
The Digital Library comprises more than one million images from hundreds of collections worldwide. The Digital Library is continually expanded by new contributions such as: Mark Rothko Estate; Latin American Art (Cisneros Collection); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Christopher Roy: African Art and Architecture; Berlin State Museums; the Gernsheim Corpus of Master Drawings (185,000 images of old master drawings); Larry Qualls Archive (100,000 images documenting 30 years of New York City gallery exhibitions); architectural photography from Esto, Canyonlights and ART on FILE; university collections from Harvard and Yale; and historical photo archives such as the National Gallery of Art and Frick Art Reference Library, among many others.
Tools and features
Artstor users have the ability to search, organize, present, upload, and share images. In addition to keyword and advanced searching, users may browse works by geography, classification, or collection name. Users can zoom in on high-resolution images in the image viewer and review related information in image data records. They can also export images for use in classroom presentations and other non-commercial, educational uses, either as JPEGs, or presentations for PowerPoint 2007. Artstor has also developed the Offline Image Viewer (OIV), an alternative tool for giving offline classroom presentations. OIV allows users to download much larger images from Artstor, combine Artstor images with their own content to create digital slide show presentations that feature side-by-side comparisons, zooming and panning, and the ability to customize text on the slides. OIV enables instructors to give reliable classroom presentations using both high-resolution Artstor images and local content without being connected to the Internet. [6] The Artstor Digital Library is accessible through Apple iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android-powered devices, providing read-only features such as searching and browsing, zooming, and viewing saved image groups. [7]
Artstor also provides Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and digital media management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections. Shared Shelf was launched in 2011. [8] Artstor worked with ten institutional partners to develop this service: Bard College, Colby College, Cornell University, Harvard University, Middlebury College, New York University, Society of Architectural Historians, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami, and Yale University. [9]
As part of Artstor's mission of using digital technologies to further education, scholarship, and research worldwide, the organization collaborates with other institutions in the community to offer a number of services, many of them free.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Through a collaboration with Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is providing free access to more than 10,000 high-quality images and data records from six leading museums: the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art, the Walters Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. [10]
Images for Academic Publishing (IAP)
Artstor's Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge. The IAP program was initiated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 and is now available as an optional service to all museums who contribute images to the Artstor Digital Library. Scholars can access these images through the Artstor Digital Library at subscribing institutions or can request free access to IAP by contacting Artstor.
Current IAP contributors include Frank Cancian (University of California, Irvine) (forthcoming), Dallas Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mellink Archive (Bryn Mawr College), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Northwestern University Library, Princeton University Art Museum (forthcoming), the Walters Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. [11]
Built Works Registry (BWR)
Artstor and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University are collaborating on the creation of the Built Works Registry (BWR), a community-generated data resource for architectural works and the built environment. The BWR's goal is to create the system and tools to enable the gathering and widespread dissemination of a large and growing body of built works information. It will serve scholars, students, educators, librarians, and catalogers from academic and cultural heritage organizations worldwide, and will be openly accessible to the general public. The project is supported by a three-year National Leadership grant awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The Getty Research Institute (GRI), nine other institutions, and an international advisory board will also participate throughout the three-year project development cycle. BWR data will be contributed to the Getty Vocabulary Program’s Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA) and will be a critical component to the controlled vocabulary warehouse in Shared Shelf. [12]
Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive (SAHARA)
The SAH Architecture Resources Archive (SAHARA), an online library of architectural and landscape images for research and teaching, is a collaboration among The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), scholars of architectural history, librarians, and Artstor, funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. [13]
EMET (Embedded Metadata Extraction Tool)
EMET is a software tool that is freely available for download as a stand-alone application. [14] EMET is intended to facilitate management and preservation of digital images and their incorporation into external databases and applications. EMET was created by Artstor through funding from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). For programmers interested in reviewing and customizing the code, EMET is also available as an open source application on SourceForge. [15]
A slide library is a library that houses a collection of photographic slides, either as a part of a larger library or image archive, or standing alone within a larger organization, such as an academic department of a college or university, a museum, or a corporation. Typically, a "slide library" contains slides depicting artwork, architecture, or cultural objects, and is typically used for the study, teaching, and documentation of art history, architectural history, and visual culture. Other academic disciplines, such as biology and other sciences, also maintain image collections akin to slide libraries. Corporations may also have image libraries to maintain and document their publications and history. Increasingly, these types of libraries are known as "Visual Resources Collections," as they may be responsible for all "visual" materials for the study of a subject and include still and moving images in a variety of physical and virtual formats. They may contain:
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
Archnet is a collaborative digital humanities project focused on Islamic architecture and the built environment of Muslim societies. Conceptualized in 1998 and originally developed at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in co-operation with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. It has been maintained by the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture since 2011.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global "biodiversity community". The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians, and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to facilitate greater access, interoperability, and reuse of content and data. BHL provides a range of services, data exports, and APIs to allow users to download content, harvest source data files, and reuse materials for research purposes. Through taxonomic intelligence tools developed by Global Names Architecture, BHL indexes the taxonomic names throughout the collection, allowing researchers to locate publications about specific taxa. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, BHL's portal provides free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes, comprising over 59 million pages, from the 15th-21st centuries.
The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) are supported by the University of Florida Digital Library Center in the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) comprise a constantly growing collection of digital resources from the University of Florida's library collections as well as partner institutions. Founded in April 2006, UFDC has added over 622,114 items - books, newspapers, oral histories, videos, photos, data sets, and more - with over 14 million pages.
Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) describes the content of art databases by articulating a conceptual framework for describing and accessing information about works of art, architecture, other material culture, groups and collections of works, and related images. The CDWA includes 532 categories and subcategories. A small subset of categories are considered core in that they represent the minimum information necessary to identify and describe a work. The CDWA includes discussions, basic guidelines for cataloging, and examples.
The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) that brings together a consortium of college and university libraries, public libraries, museums, and related institutions with the stated mission of "advanc[ing] research, learning, social justice, and the public good through digital library technologies." It was formed in 1995.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institution staff as well as the scholarly community and general public with information and reference support. Its collections number nearly 3 million volumes including 50,000 rare books and manuscripts.
Asia Art Archive (AAA) is a nonprofit organisation based in Hong Kong that documents the recent history of contemporary art in Asia within an international context. AAA incorporates material that members of local art communities find relevant to the field, and provides educational and public programming. AAA is one of the most comprehensive publicly accessible collections of research materials in the field. In activating its collections, AAA initiates public, educational, and residency programmes. AAA also offers research grants and publishes art and cultural criticism on its online platform 'Like a Fever'.
Archival research is a type of research which involves seeking out and extracting evidence from archival records. These records may be held either in collecting institutions, such as libraries and museums, or in the custody of the organization that originally generated or accumulated them, or in that of a successor body. Archival research can be contrasted with (1) secondary research, which involves identifying and consulting secondary sources relating to the topic of enquiry; and (2) with other types of primary research and empirical investigation such as fieldwork and experiment.
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC was formed in 2006 to facilitate collaboration that results in enhanced resources for research communities. Called a groundbreaking partnership, NYARC also provides a framework for collaboration among art research libraries.
Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-profit, tax-exempt consortium of American libraries with collections of medieval and early modern manuscripts, that is, handwritten books made in the traditions of the world's scribal cultures. The DS Catalog represents these manuscript collections in a web-based platform form building a national union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and early modern studies.
The Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive is a study collection of more than one million photographic reproductions of works of art from the fourth to the mid-twentieth century by over 40,000 artists trained in the Western tradition located in the Frick Art Reference Library on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was founded in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick, the daughter of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, to facilitate object-oriented research. The documentation it offers records the essential elements of the biography of the work of art: the artist, title, present owner, as well as historical information such as changes of attribution, ownership and condition, all of which are essential for the study of the history of art.
Museum informatics is an interdisciplinary field of study that refers to the theory and application of informatics by museums. It represents a convergence of culture, digital technology, and information science. In the context of the digital age facilitating growing commonalities across museums, libraries and archives, its place in academe has grown substantially and also has connections with digital humanities.
The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), founded in 1961, is a consortium of 90 universities and colleges in the United States that promotes the advancement of knowledge about India in the U.S. It carries out this purpose by: awarding fellowships to scholars and artists to carry out their research and artistic projects in India; by operating intensive programs in a variety of Indian languages in India; by sponsoring conferences, workshops and outreach activities; by supporting U.S. study abroad and service learning programs in India; by assisting and facilitating the research of all U.S. scholars in India; and by operating two research archives, the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology and the Center for Art and Archaeology. The AIIS is a member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
Howard Besser is a scholar of digital preservation, digital libraries, and preservation of film and video. He is Professor of Cinema Studies and the founding director of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program ("MIAP"), a graduate program in the Tisch School. Besser also worked as a Senior Scientist at New York University's Digital Library Initiative. He conducted extensive research in image databases, multimedia operation, digital library, and social and cultural influence of the latest Information Technology. Besser is a prolific writer and speaker, and has consulted with many governments, educational institutions, and arts agencies on digital preservation matters. Besser researched libraries' new technology, archives, and museums. Besser has been actively contributing at the international level to build metadata and upgrade the quality of the cultural heritage community. He predominantly, focused on image and multimedia databases; digital library aspects ; cultural and societal impacts of information technology, and developing new teaching methods through technology such as web-based instructions and distance learning. Besser was closely involved in development of the Dublin Core and the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), international standards within librarianship.
Ithaka Harbors, Inc. is a US not-for-profit, the parent company of digital library website JSTOR, the digital preservation service Portico, and the research and consulting group Ithaka S+R. Its stated mission is to "help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways". Ithaka was founded in 2003 by Kevin M. Guthrie. Ithaka's total revenue was $105 million in 2019, most of it from JSTOR service fees.
The documentation of cultural property is a critical aspect of collections care. As stewards of cultural property, museums collect and preserve not only objects but the research and documentation connected to those objects, in order to more effectively care for them. Documenting cultural heritage is a collaborative effort. Essentially, registrars, collection managers, conservators, and curators all contribute to the task of recording and preserving information regarding collections. There are two main types of documentation museums are responsible for: records generated in the registration process—accessions, loans, inventories, etc. and information regarding research on objects and their historical significance. Properly maintaining both types of documentation is vital to preserving cultural heritage.
A Collections Management System (CMS), sometimes called a Collections Information System, is software used by the collections staff of a collecting institution or by individual private collectors and collecting hobbyists or enthusiasts. Collecting institutions are primarily museums and archives and cover a very broad range from huge, international institutions, to very small or niche-specialty institutions such as local historical museums and preservation societies. Secondarily, libraries and galleries are also collecting institutions. Collections Management Systems (CMSs) allow individuals or collecting institutions to organize, control, and manage their collections' objects by “tracking all information related to and about” those objects. In larger institutions, the CMS may be used by collections staff such as registrars, collections managers, and curators to record information such as object locations, provenance, curatorial information, conservation reports, professional appraisals, and exhibition histories. All of this recorded information is then also accessed and used by other institutional departments such as “education, membership, accounting, and administration."
Murtha Baca was an American educator and professional renowned in the field of information science, particularly for her expertise in the area of metadata and digital information systems.