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

Posted March 17th, 2007 by Jenny Lee, Pratt Institute
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A March 13, 2007 ARTstor press release brings news of an important development in the open access movement:
 

Excerpt:

"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..."

How to cite this work

Jenny Lee. "Metropolitan Museum and ARTstor Announce Pioneering Initiative to Provide Digital Images to Scholars at No Charge." Academic Commons Issue Name (Spring 2008): 21 August 2008. <http://www.academiccommons.org/>.
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Re: Metropolitan Museum and ARTstor Announce Pioneering Initiati

On March 19th, 2007 David Green, Knowledge Culture said:
This is an incredibly important first-step announcement by the Metropolitan Museum, which we all trust will soon be followed by other museums, for teachers, scholars and academic publishers who use museum images in their work. An excellent article on the often exorbitant costs faced by art scholars in publishing their work is Jennifer Howard's "Picture Imperfect," in the Chronicle of Higher Education last August 6 (see http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i48/48a01201.htm). The Met's plans are also referenced in her article. It is expected that ARTstor (with its still somewhat limited acess) will be just one of several portals for accessing this collection of images - so stay tuned for further news. Also important is to be aware of other related efforts, such as the Getty Museum's proposal to launch digital images of many of the works in its collections via the Open Archives Initiative protocol, allowing the harvesting both of metadata and images from the Getty"s OAI server. See Kenneth Hamma, "Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility," in D-Lib Magazine at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html. David Green Knowledge Culture Fairfield, CT davidgreen@knowledgeculture.com