Cover Story

Picturing Progress

Features

ArtSTOR(ies) at FIT

Is Everybody Aleph?

SUNY Borrowing

Team E-Resource

14 2 16

James Steenbergen

How to Contact Us

Linkable Links

In 2004, the Provost’s office, in conjunction with SUNY’s Office of Library and Information Services, secured a contract with ARTstor, a non-profit organization funded and created by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ARTstor offers digital images and related data for non-commercial and scholarly, non-profit educational use. Currently, ARTstor contains over 400,000 images and continues to grow. In addition to a standard art history survey collection, it includes numerous topical collections such as the Huntington Library of Asian Art, and the Carnegie Arts of the United States collection. ARTstor has been actively adding important collections and developing partnerships with organizations such as the AMICO Library, Artists’ Rights Society for 20th and 21st century works of art, and with the Grove Dictionary of Art.

At the Fashion Institute of Technology, initial interest in ARTstor came from art historians, but even their enthusiasm was tempered with caution. There were concerns about image quality, about whether familiar images would be available, and perhaps most importantly, about technical support. No one wanted be fumbling with equipment in front of their students. And then there were issues about the ARTstor interface itself. Searching and creating image collections in ARTstor is not exactly intuitive. Nevertheless, Kodak’s and Nikon’s announcements that they would no longer manufacture slide projectors and film cameras respectively, signaled that the future was here.

We first offered workshops in our Center for Excellence in Teaching, thinking that these would suffice. But because of the questions we received, we quickly recognized that before we could get to the “how-to,” we needed to help faculty and administrators conceptualize ARTstor’s different functions as both an integrated searchable repository, and a presentation tool designed specifically for teaching and learning. We also realized that we needed to work one-on-one with faculty -- even accompanying them to their classrooms when requested. Although this took a great deal of our time, we knew we had succeeded when a faculty member who had been among the most resistant, exclaimed -- when confronted with a failed digital projector -- that she couldn’t possibly teach her class with slides again.

After nearly a third of the art history faculty had successfully taught with ARTstor, it became clear that department image resources should be spent exclusively on digital technology. No new slides are being made, but the slide library remains a critical resource, and our slide curator remains indispensable. One of his most important contributions to our adoption of digital images was the creation of targeted course-specific image groups. Faculty were too often overwhelmed when their searches yielded hundreds or even thousands of images, many of which were redundant or off-target. Our Visual Resource Curator’s extensive knowledge of the images our faculty use, allowed him to create folders of high-quality images that meet their needs.

Clearly, faculty support is a major component in the successful transition from analogue to digital. However, as teaching becomes increasingly dependent on digital technology, we need to look to the broader campus community for technical support and resources. The fact is that digital projectors and laptops cost a lot more money to purchase and maintain than analogue equipment. And although ARTstor itself has cited FIT among its leading users, it will be some time before we have full faculty participation.