Talking with ARTstor’s James Shulman

By Cheryl La Guardia -- Library Journal, 7/15/2005

After I reviewed ARTstor in the E-Views and Reviews column, LJ 9/15/04, a few readers sent email with concerns about the product. So I invited general feedback in the LJ 11/1/04 column and got lots of comments and questions, this time from a bevy of readers. I recently summarized these questions and addressed them to James Shulman, executive director of ARTstor, and received the following reply, which users and potential subscribers may well find useful.

Please send me your suggestions and concerns about e-resources; I will continue to work to get them addressed by publishers and vendors.

La Guardia: Have you reconsidered issues that readers note are serious deterrents to ARTstor's adoption by large institutions, such as the need for multicampus systems to be treated as entities, not consortia; the need for faculty at research institutions to be able to access and use material outside the United States; and what some perceive to be the inequity of the JSTOR pricing model when applied to a specialized collection that can only be used in a special way?

Shulman: Until we were more comfortable with the intellectual property laws outside the United States, we limited usage to a participating institution's facilities when someone was using the resource outside of the United States. We have just amended the ARTstor terms and conditions concerning use and have eliminated that restriction, so faculty members may now use the resource outside of the United States.

I know some institutions would prefer lower ARTstor participation fees or a different classification methodology, but I emphasize one main point: we are trying to build a campuswide resource the community will be able to depend upon for the long term. We don’t want ARTstor collections to become central to the teaching and learning of scholars and students and then see it disappear because we didn’t plan in a way to assure that it would continue to be available. Our goal is to recover operational costs at the end of five years—a goal we are still a good way from attaining—and to provide a solid financial underpinning for the organization that will allow ARTstor to meets its long-term commitment to its participating institutions.

We also don’t see ARTstor as a specialized resource. Teachers, scholars, and students in a whole range of fields are hungry for well-organized image collections. Initial content in ARTstor is focused on images that have been a vital part of the teaching and research in art, art history, and architecture for decades. However, ARTstor also offers the opportunity to open up typically siloed collections—to make an institution’s own special collections more broadly available and for individual researchers and students to add their own digital images. These scenarios broaden the scope of ARTstor beyond just "art" and create an interdisciplinary base of digital images for research and teaching across the institution.

Readers have expressed concern about the potential ARTstor has for creating a monopoly in the library environment and say they would feel more positively toward the product if ARTstor were creating a liberating, rather than constraining, environment for image use. This is keenly felt at large institutions, where a variety of easy-to-use resources already exist. Readers have expressed the opinion that for the price, ARTstor should be offering more than the functionality of other commercially available, lower-priced products, not less. Can you please speak to these concerns?

Intellectual property challenges in the area of art images are really quite significant, and the anxiety levels about the uses people make of them are very high. We have been working with museums, photographers, artists, and government agencies, both here and abroad, to find ways we can all work together “around a table” to facilitate the educational use of images. There are no magic solutions to these complicated problems. Part of our approach has been to use a proprietary software environment that introduces complications for some institutions that prefer to use other software.

The fact remains that if we had insisted upon the distribution of images from ARTstor for unfettered local use, we would have never been able to build the collections in the first place. We accept this compromise as necessary for the time being but hope that over time our content providers will become comfortable moving to a less-restrictive environment. In the meantime, we understand the importance of being as adaptable as possible to the myriad software environments in place at our participating institutions, and we are doing all we can to facilitate those linkages.

We know ARTstor won’t fit the needs of all institutions, but participation thus far indicates some institutions are seeing the potential value of ARTstor. We currently have over 400 institutions participating in ARTstor in less than one year—including 39 ARL members and twice as many community colleges. The challenge for us is to continue to enhance the value of ARTstor to this broad participant base. If we can continue to provide value, we can continue to grow, and, one hopes, begin to see a reduction in the systemwide costs of creating and providing digital image resources.

Readers have experienced difficulty in achieving true integration of ARTstor images and images from other sources in the offline viewer, particularly in saving a single lecture using both types of images, and with the implications of student use in a large university setting. Does ARTstor appreciate the extent to which students are required to generate presentations rather than just study selected groups of images? And what can you tell us about ARTstor's future plans for true interoperability?

Students and faculty can use the downloadable offline viewer that allows them to mix ARTstor content and local content and present it offline. It is a great way for students to do active research and make presentations, and there’s a new version coming out this summer.

We are pursuing two major initiatives to provide linkages into ARTstor from other software environments—commonly referred to as “interoperating.” As I mentioned earlier, for us to build and provide access to a large library of digital images, we are relying on the Fair Use principle of U.S. copyright. To be able to rely on Fair Use, we need to ensure that the images are being used for noncommercial, scholarly activities only. We cannot make those assurances if high-resolution ARTstor images are released into other software environments.

We are very aware of the community’s interoperability concerns and needs and are presently working on two [related] initiatives. First, we are developing an XML gateway that will enable federated searching into the ARTstor Digital Library. Secondly, working with University of Virginia, Tufts, Princeton, James Madison University, and the Open Knowledge Institute (OKI), we are creating an application protocol interface (API) that will allow content stored in local repositories or other licensed resources to be both searched and retrieved via a search conducted in the ARTstor software.

Have you devised a solution to the lack of controlled vocabulary for searching fields among and across collections?

Cleaning and enhancing the heterogeneous data in ARTstor by the use of controlled vocabulary is a very high priority. We have been working on making use of a number of community-recognized standards such as ULAN (Union List of Artists’ Names) and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus. While having electronic vocabulary resources like these thesauri are extremely helpful, cataloging (or data cleaning) is also just hard work, but it is work that we are committed to doing on an ongoing basis.

Does the new ARTstor tool kit allow for easy inclusion of user-generated text boxes?

The Offline Image Viewer (OIV) was built in the last year in response to classroom needs. A new version coming out this summer will allow for user-generated text boxes, allowing for “capture” of a zoomed detail and prescripting its presentation, and many other tools that let users “author” a presentation.