James Shulman
Executive Director
ARTstor
William W. Ying
Chief Technology Officer
ARTstor
ARTstor, a non-profit initiative created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was launched as a live service on July 1, 2004. ARTstor’s Digital Library provides digital images, associated metadata, and software tools to colleges, universities, and museums for non-commercial educational use. Since ARTstor’s position on intellectual property rights does not enable us to export large format licensed images for incorporation in locally hosted library and instructional systems, a major goal of the organization is to facilitate external discovery of content in ARTstor and to provide the means for our users to mix local and licensed content. In this discussion, we plan to update the community on ARTstor’s development and to encourage conversation about:
• Plans to enable broad access to metasearching of image content in the absence of agreed-upon protocols;
• Methods of importing content into ARTstor (in batches or one-by-one);
• Types of stresses that metasearching could cause for ARTstor’s infrastructure;
• Successes and remaining challenges of searching out from ARTstor into local repositories; and
• Possibilities of OKI as protocols for interoperating.