The College Art Association and the Digital Library Federation are pleased to announce that they are sponsoring the development of the Academic Image Exchange.

In service to the teaching and practice of the history of art and related disciplines, the Academic Image Exchange (AIE) intends to offer students, teachers, and the general public "curriculum-based" sets of screen-sized digital images for their free and unrestricted educational nonprofit use. (Higher, projectable resolutions will also be available.)

First to be introduced will be a selection of images that satisfies a significant portion of the digital image requirements of most college- and university-level introductory courses in art history. The AIE will provide several kinds of exchange facilities:

• for faculty to create and advertise want lists of images for teaching
• for scholars, museums, libraries, and photographers for nonprofit educational use to contribute from the public domain or provide under license high quality images sufficient for classroom projection
• for visual resource specialists to participate in shared cataloguing of the images and the works they represent
• for faculty, students, and others to develop a variety of scholarly products for learning environments, such as distance learning, and for publication.

Images offered through the AIE will be chosen on the basis of their proximity to traditional course selections. An online concordance will link images to standard art history survey books. This concordance-index will thus serve as one of the entry-points to the image database, allowing teachers and students access to a wider variety of images than is available in any single textbook. All AIE offerings will be reviewed by an independent panel of art historians. This panel will select images based on their overall quality and on their utility for teaching.

The key to the present and future success of the Image Exchange will be its ability to enlist the cooperation and advocacy of the community of scholar-photographers who produce high quality color photographs to aid their own teaching and research. By using the facilities of the Internet to pool this vast resource, we will have an opportunity to create a much needed public database of art-historical images for all to use for educational purposes.

CAA and the Digital Library Federation are currently focused on the creation of a prototype of the Academic Image Exchange. The AIE development team is composed of art librarians, art and architectural historians, visual resources curators, photographers, and specialists in digital imagery and in systems design. Members and staff of CAA, the Digital Library Federation, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the faculty of the Imaging Systems Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University are contributing to the AIE prototype development effort.

Robert Baron is serving as project manager for the AIE. The Academic Image Exchange plans to demonstrate a prototype program and a selection of images at CAA’s upcoming Annual Conference in New York, February 2000.

During the course of the prototype development a variety of groups and interested parties will be consulted. Notice of future developments will be posted in CAA News. For more information, contact Robert Baron at ImExch@mindspring.com.
—Robert A. Baron