E-News @ Your Library: ARTstor

Art scholars have a new way to study art with the introduction of the ARTstor Digital Collection, a repository of over 300,000 high-quality digital images of art from many cultural areas, including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, and many other visual arts forms. A non-profit initiative founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARTstor’s mission is to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and associated fields. Noteworthy collections found in ARTstor include:

• the Arts of the United States collection of more than 4,200 images documenting the history of American art, architecture, visual, and material culture.
• the John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art, provided by Ohio State University, containing over 12,000 images of Asian art.
• the Illustrated Bartsch collection of more than 50,000 images of old master European prints (engravings, etchings, woodcuts, etc.) from the 15th to the early 19th Centuries, embodying the work of hundreds of printmakers.
• the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive providing hundreds of images of the Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang.
• the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) “Digital Design Collection” consisting of approximately 6,200 works from the Department of Architecture and Design.
  

ARTstor will revolutionize the way art history is taught as faculty will no longer be tied to a slide library, spending hours pulling slides and organizing lectures. With ARTstor, professors can establish class folders and develop lectures online. Librarians at the Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) Library have developed a Web site to support DAAP art history survey classes. All the images for the entire year’s courses have been assembled in folders within ARTstor and arranged by chapters of the textbook. The images are available to students for individual study and review, as well as for classroom presentation, complete with detailed catalog information.

According to Elizabeth Meyer, DAAP’s visual resource librarian, “ARTstor allows art historians expanded access to images, as well as introduces new ways of studying art by utilizing the many viewing features.” While slides will still be available for classroom instruction, Meyer is confident that as faculty become more familiar with ARTstor they will embrace this new format. “A case in point,” she adds: “ARTstor provides the opportunity to zoom in on any image, thus providing close-up details of individual works. This makes it is possible to view Latin inscriptions, study brushstrokes, as well as view an artist’s signature – something not possible with slide lectures.” In addition to the existing collection of 300,000 images, additional images from personal collections or scans from the DAAP slide collection can be added to personal lecture folders.

While the immediate impact of this resource will resonate with art history faculty, ARTstor will support and enhance teaching and learning in a myriad of disciplines including anthropology, literature, romance languages, just to name a few. To learn more about ARTstor, contact Elizabeth.Meyer@uc.edu or Jane.Carlin@uc.edu at the DAAP library. ARTstor is available to all UC faculty, students, and staff at <www.artstor.org>.

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