[A2k] Met Museum to provide digital images to scholars at no charge

[mediahub]

From
http://www.metmuseum.org/press_room/full_release.asp?prid=%7BA113E0AD-AA
4E-471B-8F04-736A21F1A70A%7D :

Metropolitan Museum and ARTstor Announce Pioneering Initiative to
Provide Digital Images to Scholars at No Charge


In a new initiative designed to assist scholars with teaching, study,
and the publication of academic works, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
will distribute, free of charge, high-resolution digital images from an
expanding array of works in its renowned collection for use in academic
publications. This new service, which is effective immediately, is
available through ARTstor, a non-profit organization that makes art
images available for educational use.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art has long sought to address the
significant challenges that scholars confront in seeking to secure and
license images of objects from the Museum's collections," stated
Metropolitan Museum Director Philippe de Montebello in making the
announcement. "We hope, through this collaboration, to play a pioneering
role in addressing one of the profound challenges facing scholars in art
history, and scholarly publishing, today."

ARTstor's Executive Director, James Shulman, added: "By taking such a
bold step in supporting publications based on art-historical research,
the Metropolitan is providing enormous leadership to the entire sector.
Scholars - in higher education and in museums - have been struggling
with the question of how digitization might help to enable, rather than
hinder, scholarly communications. For all involved, it is obvious that,
when faced with an important directional challenge, the Metropolitan is
providing decisive leadership."

Initially approached by the Metropolitan Museum in 2005 to develop this
initiative, ARTstor has worked in close consultation with Metropolitan
Museum staff to create its new service, entitled "Images for Academic
Publishing" (IAP), which will make images available via software on the
ARTstor Web site (www.artstor.org). Initially, nearly 1,700 images
representative of the broad range of the Metropolitan Museum's
encyclopedic collection will be available through the more than 730
institutions that currently license ARTstor. Efforts to expand this
accessibility are now underway and will be announced by ARTstor at a
later date.

ARTstor, a digital image library, was created in 2001 as a non-profit
initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is now an independent
non-profit organization dedicated to serving education and scholarship
in the arts and humanities. The more than 730 non-profit institutions
currently participating in ARTstor are located in North America,
Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - founded in 1870 with a mission to
collect, preserve, and display works of art spanning 5,000 years of
world culture from every part of the globe, and to educate the public
about art - is the most comprehensive art museum in the Western
Hemisphere with a collection now including more than two million works
of art.

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March 12, 2007

Rik Panganiban
Program Coordinator
Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere
Social Science Research Council
PH: 212.377.2700 x 644
FX: 212.377.2727
email: panganiban@ssrc.org
810 Seventh Avenue, 31st Floor
New York NY 10019
Web: www.ssrc.org/programs/media