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ARTstor Offers Interdisciplinary Image Resources and More


November 13, 2006

Students, faculty, and researchers at the University of Oregon now have online access to approximately 500,000 visual images and related catalog data through ARTstor, a nonprofit initiative with a mission to encourage the use of digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and other fields.

Initiated at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the ARTstor Digital Library comprises digital images and their corresponding data, the tools to make active use of those images, and an online environment intended to balance the interests of users with those of content providers. ARTstor documents artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures and focuses on, but is not limited to, the arts. As a campus-wide resource, ARTstor is designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images, as well as by art historians.

”ARTstor is a major addition to the digital resources available through the UO Libraries,” said Ed Teague, head of the Architecture and Allied Arts Library. ”ARTstor provides the UO community with an incredible range of visual materials for instructional and scholarly use, as well as broader access to images of important art, architecture, design, and cultural objects.”

ARTstor’s Charter Collection contains approximately 500,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines and offers sufficient breadth and depth to support a wide range of noncommercial educational and scholarly activities.

The Charter Collection derives from several source collections that are the product of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic archives, publishers, slide libraries, and individual scholars. These source collections include:

  • The Image Gallery—more than 200,000 visual arts images derived from a university slide library constructed in response to teaching needs

  • The Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection

  • The Carnegie Arts of the United States—images documenting American art, architecture, and visual and material culture

  • The Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts—a collection that documents the architectural history of the Western world

  • The Huntington Archive of Asian Art—images of the art of Asia from 3000 B.C. through the present

  • The Illustrated Bartsch—images of more than 50,000 old master European prints from the 15th to the 19th century

  • The Dunhuang Archive—images from the Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China, along with related objects

  • The Museum of Modern Art Architecture and Design Collection

  • Native American Art and Culture from the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

ARTstor’s software tools enable users to view and analyze images through features such as zooming and panning, and to save groups of images for personal or group uses, as well as for use in lectures and other presentation, either online or off-line.

UO community members can access ARTstor directly at www.artstor.org or through the UO Libraries web site. For more information, contact Ed Teague at 346-1954, ehteague@uoregon.edu.



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