Artstor to help launch the Digital Public Library of America

Yupik Eskimo | Mask: The Bad Spirit of the Mountain | late 19th century | Dallas Museum of Art

Artstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide access to more than 10,000 high-quality images from six leading museums.

As part of its collaboration with Artstor, the DPLA will aggregate and make available data records and links to images from six major American museums: the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection), the Walters Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open Artstor, a new Artstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public domain images.

The DPLA is a large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries, and archives to build a digital library platform to make America’s cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point. As part of its two-year Digital Hubs Pilot Project, the DPLA is working with several large digital content providers—including the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution—and seven state and regional digital libraries to make digitized content from their online catalogs easily accessible to all. The DPLA will celebrate the groundbreaking work of hundreds of librarians, innovators, and other dedicated volunteers in its collective effort to build the first national digital library platform on April 18 at the Boston Public Library.

Thomas Eakins | Taking the Count | 1898 | Image © Yale University Art Gallery

Artstor’s Digital Library (which currently includes over 1.5 million images aggregated from over 250 museums, artists, libraries, and archives around the world) is licensed to more than 1,500 subscribing institutions worldwide for exclusively non-commercial educational uses. Open Artstor, launching in phases over the course of 2013 and beginning with the DPLA collaboration, will make thousands of public domain images from the collections in the Digital Library freely accessible to everyone.

“We are enormously grateful for this partnership with Artstor and its partner museums,” remarked Dan Cohen, DPLA Executive Director. “Our vision for the Digital Public Library of America has always been one of open access to the full range of human expression, including visual culture, and Artstor’s contribution adds vital works of art to our growing, networked collection.”

“The DPLA is quickly realizing a vision of raising discovery of our shared cultural heritage to a whole new level,” said Artstor President James Shulman. “We look forward to our collaboration serving everyone from the boxer who is fascinated with Eakins’s ‘Taking the Count’ (Yale) to someone studying a mask of The Bad Spirit of the Mountain made by the Yup’ik Eskimo people (Dallas Museum of Art) via open educational resources such as Smarthistory/Khan Academy.”

The Digital Public Library of America is taking the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. This impact-oriented research effort unites the leaders from all types of libraries, museums, and archives with educators, industry, and government to define the vision for a digital library in service of the American public.  More information is online at http://dp.la. To find out more about the DPLA launch, April 18-19 in Boston, visit http://dp.la/get-involved/events/launch/.

Artstor is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and associated fields through digital technologies. In addition to the Artstor Digital Library of more than 1.5 million images, Artstor also makes available Shared Shelf, a Web-based media management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections. For more information, visit http://artstor.org.

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For press information about the Digital Public Library of America, contact Kenny Whitebloom, Project Coordinator, at 617-384-9107.

For press information about Artstor, contact Giovanni Garcia, Communications Manager, at 212-500-2404.

Download the press release here.