Change in Access to Digital Images of Art Works (AMICO Subsumed by AMICA and ARTstor)
by Alex Ross
The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) collection of online databases containing digital images of works of art and other cultural artifacts has been realigned by the demise of AMICO, the Art Museum Image Consortium, which created a pioneering imagebase of works from more than 30 art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and National Museums of Scotland. These museums all contributed images of works from their collections to AMICO, which then licensed them to academic institutions, like Stanford, where they are typically used for individual study by art history students or for classroom projection. At its height, AMICO had available a pool of more than 100,000 images of art works from its member museums.
AMICO recently ceased operations and has licensed many of its images, in non-exclusive agreements, to several other vendors. Images from two of those vendors are currently available to the Stanford community.
AMICA
An imagebase produced by Cartography Associates (AMICA is an acronym for Art Museum Images from Cartography Associates), this resource contains more than 115,000 digital images of art works from the collections of an international roster of leading art museums, and includes painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts from many countries and periods. It currently includes most of the images from the former AMICO file, and is actively engaged in licensing additional images from the museums formerly associated with AMICO.
Third Avenue, Manhattan, 1935, by Berenice Abbott
AMICA is accessible to Stanford users via the Luna Insight program, both as a fully-featured, downloadable program, and as a slightly leaner web browser plugin. (For instructions on downloading Insight, please go to http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/hdis/insight.html or disable all pop-up blockers in your browser and then go directly to AMICA.) In AMICA, viewed through Insight, one can select images, save them, create and show custom Insight presentations, or download them to other presentation software, such as PowerPoint.
An easy way to get started searching in AMICA is to click on the "search" button and then choose "by creator name" from the resulting menu. By entering the first few letters of an artist's last name, clicking the "list" button, selecting the correct artist name from the list of results, and then clicking the "select" button, one gets all the images in AMICA of works by that artist in the form of thumbnails that can be enlarged and manipulated. More complex searches, by keyword or data field, for example, are also available.
Using Insight, it is also possible to access some of the other imagebases that are available from Stanford's Humanities Digital Information Service, such as Chicana Art, Farber Gravestone Collection, and Maps of Africa. (For more information, see http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/hdis/image.html.)
ARTstor
Some of the former AMICO images have also been licensed and made available by ARTstor, which is a fast-growing database, sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. ARTstor offers about 300,000 digital images of art works and architectural monuments potentially from any geographical area or historical period. In addition to images of works from museum collections, ARTstor has also acquired images from such sources as archaeological sites, photo archives, slide collections, and even illustrations in books. In its acquisition of images of art works, ARTstor has been especially mindful of adding them in the form of discrete collections, in other words, groups of images that are related in such a way that their value as corpora are enhanced. ARTstor expects to grow to 500,000 images by the summer of 2006. See also Imagine All the Images-ARTStor Acquisition and Insight Enhancements in the September 2004 issue of this newsletter.
ARTstor is accessible to the Stanford community via the Databases A-Z list on the SULAIR web site, or by first disabling all pop-up blockers and then going to http://www.artstor.org/. It comes with its own viewing software and provides the capacity to select, save, create and show custom ARTstor presentations online or off, or download low-resolution images to presentation programs, such as PowerPoint.
An artist search is probably the easiest way to get started in ARTstor, although its search interface also makes subject searching relatively intuitive.
- For an artist search, click on "Advanced Search" at the top of the ARTstor "Search and Browse for Images" home page. In the resulting interface, type the artist's first name in the top box and last name in the next box down. Connect them with an "and" by using the pull-down menu. Leave the adjacent index boxes showing the "All Fields" default. Under "Select Collections," leave the default "Search Across All Collections" selected. Click on the "Search" button, and the works in ARTstor of the artist being searched will appear as thumbnails that can be enlarged and manipulated.
- For a simple subject search, type a subject keyword (e.g., "peasants") into the "Keyword Search" box on the "Search and Browse for Images" home page and click the "Search" button.
