Library

Newsletter

New England art librarians come to MassArt for ARTstor workshop

On December 3rd, over thirty art librarians from Maine to Connecticut came to MassArt for a workshop on ARTstor, the recently-released image database that the Godine Library purchased this summer. Because MassArt is thus far the only institution in Boston to have purchased this database, our art and museum library colleagues came here to see it in action. The database’s 300,000 images include Western art, American art, Asian art, architectural drawings, Native American art, and a MOMA design collection, among other areas.

As an article in the New York Times put it, “Doctors have stethoscopes. Plumbers have wrenches. And art-history professors have slides. Or at least that’s the way it has been. But now, a vast digital library of world art has gone online with its first 300,000 images. The project—known as ARTstor and financed by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation—could eventually revolutionize the way art history is taught and studied.” (“For Art History Scholars, Illumination is just a Click Away.” The New York Times. August 14, 2004)

Here at MassArt, we have yet to see if this image database will revolutionize the way art history is taught, but it certainly is getting a lot of use by some of our faculty. Features available in the database include the capability to save groups of images in work folders, set up course reserves for students to view the images, save or print the images, and use an offline viewer to project the images from the database, thus eliminating the need for the old-fashioned slide carousel. Users are able to mix images that they have from other sources (for example, our AMICO image database or

their own personal collection of digital images) with ARTstor images to create a presentation using the offline viewer. Additionally, users can zoom in on the images, retrieve provenance information, add their own personal notes fields, and project images side by side.

Anecdotal evidence suggests ARTstor is popular among MassArt students. Some students are looking for any work by a certain artist, some are looking for a specific piece, and some are looking for different representations of one subject (for example, give me all images of monkeys or all landscapes, etc.). Just at the reference desk the other day, I had a student come up and ask about examples of work by graphic designer, Armin Hofmann. I introduced him to the ARTstor database where we found 3 pages of the artist’s work. The student was thrilled and hurried off to tell his classmates.

A few of the results in ARTstor for a search on Armin Hoffman