ARTstor's Digital Landscape: As the Image Library Turns One Year Old, It Is Finding an Expanding Audience across Disciplines

As teachers, scholars, and students in disciplines well beyond the arts attempt new approaches to teaching and learning--approaches that require the integration of visual materials into their curricula and research--they are encountering organizational and financial barriers. Traditional approaches to the development, management, and delivery of institutional collections and services cannot support the evolving and expanding need for images. A role is being envisioned for a trusted third party whose place in this evolving ecosystem would be both to foster cross-institutional collaboration and help alleviate organizational redundancies in order to contain systemwide costs. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation created ARTstor precisely to be this kind of "trusted third party." This new member of the arts and higher education community would, from the outset, work with all of these constituencies on an international stage. ARTstor's mission is, in a nutshell, to help higher education institutions respond to the complex and expensive set of challenges described above via the ficticious Professor Smith. As an expanding digital library offering (even at this early date) hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data, ARTstor seeks to provide scholars, teachers, and students with the kinds of collections and software tools they need to make the pivotal transition from slides to digital images. This article discusses ARTstor in the present and what can be expected in the future.