Maximize your collections’ impact with Artstor on JSTOR

Join a distinguished community of cultural heritage institutions committed to advancing knowledge and inspiring discovery. By contributing your high-quality digital collections for licensing on Artstor on JSTOR at no cost, you’ll unlock new opportunities to reach a global audience, preserve your collections’ legacy, and help us shape the future of multimedia research.

Why contribute to Artstor on JSTOR?

• Trust and legacy: For over twenty years, leading institutions have trusted Artstor to feature their collections among the best in the world. With 2+ million images and other media available internationally, we are dedicated to enhancing the value and reach of your visual media while ensuring your digital assets remain secure and safe.
• Expand your reach—at no cost: JSTOR is one of the most highly used scholarly resources in the world. Your content on JSTOR will directly impact teaching and research through our network of 14,000 participating institutions globally. Artstor-licensed content received over 4.7 million hits in 2023.
• Maximize discoverability and usability: Artstor on JSTOR offers a state-of-the-art digital platform that supports integrated search and discovery of texts, images, and multimedia. Its functionality enhances teaching, learning, and research in the classroom and beyond.
• A non-exclusive partnership: Sharing a collection on Artstor is non-exclusive, allowing you, as the copyright owner, to freely distribute your images through any other online website, database, or commercial licensing company.
• Be a part of something bigger: As a nonprofit organization, our mission is to expand access to knowledge as equitably and affordably as possible. Contributing to Artstor on JSTOR aligns your collections with a mission-driven initiative dedicated to expanding educational impact and reach.
• Gain valuable insights: Monitor your collection’s impact through detailed usage analytics. We provide comprehensive collection-usage statistics and online activity metrics to demonstrate how your content is being used. Clearly labeled contact information and URLs drive traffic back to your website for additional context and licensing opportunities.

How to contribute

• Review our content guidelines for contributors
• Submit your information for consideration, which includes a brief summary of the proposed content
• Upon acceptance, sign the licensing agreement
• Transfer your assets to us and receive expert guidance and assistance throughout the process

Guidelines

Rights

The first question for potential contributors is whether they own or represent the rights to the underlying work, the photographic rights to the image of the work, or both, for any visual media under consideration.

Artstor on JSTOR collections are intended for educational and scholarly use, as outlined in our Terms and Conditions of Use, which users must adhere to. This context is essential when evaluating the scope of rights.

While we conduct our own analysis to determine whether an item can be released under U.S. or international intellectual property laws, it’s crucial that potential contributors provide whatever information they can about their rights ownership in order to be considered for submission.

Format

Artstor accepts a variety of media, including images, video, audio, panorama, and PDF files. Given the tools now available to our users, the best results for digital images are those that are not compressed (such as tiffs), are high-resolution (300ppi and above) and are at least 3,000 pixels in length or width. At a minimum, we accept low-resolution images (at 72ppi) at least 1032 pixels in length or width that may use a form of compression (such as JPGs).

Metadata policy

Artstor contributors are diverse and interdisciplinary, resulting in a wide range of metadata standards, structures, and purposes. We prioritize preserving data integrity, except in cases of clear factual errors, as we consider our contributors to be subject matter experts in their fields. To ensure a consistent user experience at the asset level, we map contributed metadata to an internal template based on the Visual Resource Association Core (VRA Core) schema.

Metadata enhancements

Artstor on JSTOR enables all licensed collections to be searched and browsed and/or sorted by object-type classification (e.g. painting, architecture, etc.), geography, and earliest and latest date. The classification terms are applied from an in-house controlled list (painting, sculpture, etc.); the country terms derive from the Getty Research Institute’s Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN); and numeric earliest and latest dates are applied to each asset. These enhancements are not visible within the metadata records but operate behind the scenes to facilitate discovery.