Creating the Digital Art Library

Book excerpt: This special report looks at the efforts of ten leading art libraries and image collections to digitize their holdings. The study reports on the efforts of The National Gallery of Canada, Cornell University?s Knight Resource Center, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, The Illinois Institute of Technology, The National Archives and Records Administration, McGill University, Ohio State University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the joint effort of Harvard, Princeton, The University of California, San Diego, the University of Minnesota and others to develop a union catalog for cultural objects. Among the issues covered: cost of outsourcing, cost of in-house conversions, the future of 35 mm slides and related equipment, use of ARTstor and other commercial services, ease of interlibrary loan in images and the creation of a union catalog, prioritizing holdings for digitization, relationship of art libraries to departmental image collections, marketing image collections, range of end users of image collections, determining levels of access to the collection, digitization and distribution of backup materials on artists lives and times, equipment selection, copyright, and other issues in the creation and maintenance of digital art libraries.