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VII. Academic Image Cooperative
(formerly: Academic Image Exchange)

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The Academic Image Cooperative was a non-profit venture whose mission it was to collect digital images of works of art to be distributed to, or be accessible by educators, scholars and (as much as possible) by the general public. AIC images were intended to be generally unencumbered by copyright restraints and would have been designated to be used in non-profit educational environments, including academic publishing, and also for private, non-commercial use. Its intended strategy was to exploit the large numbers of public domain images held in sympathetic public and private archives and in the personal repositories of art historians and visual resources curators world-wide.

One of its goals was to expand on a project dear to Professor H.W.Janson: making accessible teaching-quality images of the so-called "key monuments" of world art. The AIC planned to take this scheme a few steps further: First by building its collection with works actually used or collected for teaching, focusing on the traditional art historical curricula, and then by expanding the collection, as much as possible outside of the traditional curricula, to build a research collection. Central to the aim of this project was to construct a sophisticated database that could catalogue images on a scholarly level.

The AIC had the support of the Digital Library Federation and the College Art Association. Around February 2000 the DLF abandoned its support for the "prototype" phase of the AIC. Soon afterwards the Mellon Foundation announced a new project, named ArtSTOR that aimed to collect public domain and other images for site-licensed distribution to academia. Additional information on the AIC and its history may be obtained through the following links: Except for the preliminary announcements, information on the development of ArtSTOR is not included.

As of April 2001:

• Mellon Foundation announces creation of ArtSTOR: http://www.mellon.org/artstor%20announcement.html

• Max Marmor. "Toward User-Centered Digital Image Libraries" http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues20.html#toward

• DLF AIC Information Page: http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/aic.htm  [dead link]

• DLF Page: "Towards a Shared Cataloguing Tool for VR Collections" http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/toolframe.htm [dead link]

Pages hosted by the Digital Library Federation (DLF):

• Main DLF AIC information page: http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/aic.htm [dead link]

• Digital Library Federation Initiatives Page with recent announcement of AIC activities (2/2000).[dead link 12/2002]

• AIC formative meeting at Carnegie Mellon University. Report of Mellon Foundation Grant.[dead link 12/2002]

• Detailed reports on formative meetings: January 8th in New York and May 22-23 at Carnegie Mellon University. [dead link 12/2002]

• AIC mentioned in DLF Annual report: http://www.clir.org/diglib/AR9899Cover.html , and specifically in "Integrate Digital Materials Into the Fabric of Academic Life."  See also: http://www.diglib.org/collections/aic/artxdescription.htm and http://www.diglib.org/collections/aic/artxresults.htm

• Summary of April 20, 2000 focus group meeting under direction of Dan Greenstein:
  http://www.clir.org/diglib/aic/aicrev.htm    [dead link 12/2002]

Pages hosted by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI):

• Briefing by Max Marmor on Academic Image Exchange (1999) at Spring 1999 CNI Task Force Meeting: http://www.cni.org/tfms/1999a.spring/handout/Marmor99Stf.html

Pages hosted by Carnegie Mellon University

• Academic Image Cooperative Web Page with descriptive text and contact information. [dead link 12/02.]

Pages hosted by Robert Baron

• Announcement of Academic Image Exchange in CAA News, Vol. 24, No. 5 (September 1999), p. 1.

• Description of AIC Prototype features for teaching and cataloging.
  (A post by Robert Baron to CAAH: 3/1/2000)

• Download AIC brochure in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format. (February 2000)

• PowerPoint guided tour of the AIC Prototype database application
  This is the application demonstrated at the College Art Association meeting held in New York, February 2000.
  Click HERE for html version. Good for Fast Connections.
  Click HERE for information about a compressed download -- better for slow connections.

• Draft Entity Diagrams for Academic Image Cooperative Prototype

• Draft Data Models for Academic Image Cooperative Prototype.

• Making the Public Domain Public. A paper by Robert Baron delivered at the VRA/NINCH Town Meeting, San Francisco, April 2000. (Based on AIC Experience.) See, especially, Part II.

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