Last year, the Neil Hellman Library joined ARTstor, which opened up a deep store of digital images to faculty and students. Founded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARTstor is a non-profit initiative modelled after the successful JSTOR (journal) service.
ARTstor contains over 500,000 images covering art, architecture, and archeology. The ARTstor collection was built by adding other existing collections to its database; it calls itself a collection of collection. The best way to get a sense of its content, then, is to learn about these collections. Here are descriptions from an ARTstor FAQ:
The Image Gallery: The Image Gallery is meant to offer the scale and cohesion typically associated with an academic slide and photograph collection and includes over 200,000 images made from slides created in response to representative teaching needs in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Such a collection will always fall short of being comprehensive, but even in its initial stages, the Image Gallery will provide digital versions of many of the images and basic cataloging information currently sought out in everyday practice by educators, scholars and students. The Image Gallery should also allow licensed institutions to limit their investment in digitizing general teaching materials on behalf of their faculty and students. With the recent addition of tens of thousands of new images from a wide range of art museums and other individuals and institutions, including more than 80,000 images from the former AMICO Library, the ARTstor Image Gallery is increasingly characterized by high-quality images and authoritative cataloging information.
The Art History Survey Collection: an important affiliate collection to the Image Gallery, offers a collection of nearly 4,000 images selected on the basis of 13 standard art history survey texts, some consulted in multiple editions. Most objects reproduced in at least two of these standard texts (see the textbook concordance) are represented in the Art History Survey Collection, from 35mm slides, many derived from original photography of the object or monument, others made through copystand photography from high quality illustrations in the scholarly literature.
The Illustrated Bartsch: about 57,000 images of Old Master European prints (engravings, etchings, woodcuts, etc.) from the 15th to the 19th Century, embodying the work of hundreds of printmakers derived from one of the great art reference publications of the past quarter century, The Illustrated Bartsch (96 volumes, Norwalk, CT., Abaris Books, 1976-present).
The Carnegie Arts of the United States Collection: about 4,500 images of canonic works of American art and architecture, selected by a scholarly advisory committee and a staple of teaching in American studies for forty years. This “canon” will be supplemented with a range of American art materials that will serve to contextualize and update it, to reflect current scholarly interests and methodologies.
The Huntington Archive of Asian Art: about 12,000 images of Asian art, curated by the art historians John and Susan Huntington and derived largely from the photo archive they have created at Ohio State University.
The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive: high-quality digital images of the Buddhist cave grottoes in Dunhuang, China and associated objects now physically located in collections worldwide.
The Museum of Modern Art Architecture and Design Collection: about 8,000 images of approximately 6,200 design objects and drawings from the Department of Architecture and Design of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Native American Art and Culture, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution: about 10,000 images from historic photographs documenting Native American subjects (portraits, scense, etc.), made from glass plate negatives collected by or produced under the auspices of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) beginning in the late 19th century.
Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection: 36,000 images from the Schlesinger Library’s renowned photographic archive, representing the work of both professional and amateur artistic and documentary photographers, including the work of many women photographers as well as men.
ARTstor provides much online help. Check out the About ARTstor pages to find out how to download images, use their proprietary viewer, or work with the images. The library is working with the Art Department to bring ARTstor trainers to campus this fall; if you are interested in attending training on how to use ARTstor, please let me know.
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