The Temple University Libraries are very pleased to announce online access toARTstor, a magnificent database of approximately 500,000 high resolution digital images covering “architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture”. ARTstor’s mission is to make great works of art and visual culture available for educational and noncommercial use. It has the potential to revolutionize the relationship between text and image as students and faculty liberally sprinkle images on presentations, research papers, and web pages. Each image comes with a detailed description that allows for effective searching at both a general and fine-grained level. You can even search ARTstor and JSTOR together! Participating institutions include the MOMA Architecture and Design Collection, the Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and the Schlesinger History of Women in America, among others. It is a growing collection adding new content regularly.

ARTstor was created with both users and content-holders in mind. Users can access and share hundreds of thousands of images that until now were accessible to a relative few. At the same time, controls are in place to satisfy the concerns of content-holders with regards to their copyrighted materials. Each ARTstor image comes in high and low resolution. To view the high resolution images, users must either view the images online in ARTstor or offline using ARTstor’s presentation software, the Offline Image Viewer (OIV). This means that you can only download high resolution images to the OIV, which can itself be downloaded for free on the ARTstor web site. Users can import PowerPoint presentations and their own images into the OIV as well. With the low resolution images, on the other hand, you have much more flexibility as long as the use is for educational and noncommercial purposes. You can download low resolution images to your desktop and use them in presentations, research papers, and web pages.

Within ARTstor users can create Image Groups and Shared Folders to organize, annotate, and share images with other users. Everyone can create Image Groups after creating an ID and password. To use Shared Folders you have to receive instructor privileges. This level of access is reserved mainly for faculty members. You can email your request for instructor privileges to Andrea Goldstein atandrea@temple.edu.

For more information, access ARTstor from the library web site and you’ll find a wide variety of tutorials and explanatory materials. On a more technical note, you will have to disable your popup blockers to use ARTstor. Click on Using ARTstor to see how to do this. To get started, just click Launch and away you go!

—Fred Rowland