Message-Id: <mailto:199501050106.TAA24649@library.wustl.edu> Date: Wed, 4 Jan 1995 20:07:01 -0500 From: "J. Trant, Manager, Getty AHIP Imaging Initiative" <mailto:jtrant@IO.ORG> Subject: Museum Educational Site Licensing Project Launched To: Multiple recipients of list IMAGELIB
This announcement is being cross posted to a number of related lists. Please forgive any duplicaton.THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST - PRESS INFORMATION ______________________________________________ Date: December 23, 1994 For Release: Immediate
Contact: Philippa Calnan 401 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 900 Director, Public Affairs Santa Monica, CA 90401-1455
Dale Kutzera 310-395-0388 Telephone Public Affairs Assistant 310-395-5289 Telefax
or: Jennifer Trant mailto:jtrant@getty.edu Manager, Imaging Initative Getty Art History Information Program
PILOT PROJECT TO EXPLORE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND OTHER ISSUES RELATED TO DIGITAL IMAGES AND INFORMATION
Participating Museums and Universities Announced
SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- A landmark project jointly launched by the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP) and MUSE Educational Media will address key issues in the educational use of museum images and related information delivered over computer networks. The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project will enable museum and educational communities to develop common solutions to problems now inhibiting the development of computer-based learning tools for the study of art and culture. The pilot project will test the distribution of art images and information from six museums to seven universities. Participating institutions will resolve issues of intellectual property rights, network security, and information standards, defining the terms and conditions for the educational use of museum images and information on campus networks. This collaborative venture will also demonstrate the value of digital media in the study of art and culture.
"Computer networks offer the potential to make art and cultural information widely available to more people, changing the nature of learning and research," said Eleanor Fink, director of AHIP. "By linking museums and universities, the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project will act as a laboratory for developing and testing the legal, administrative, and technical mechanisms needed to enable the full educational use of museum collections."
The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project will run from January 1, 1995 through June 30, 1997, and be jointly managed by AHIP and MUSE Educational Media, a nonprofit organization that seeks to increase public appreciation and exposure to museum holdings. It will make digitized images and descriptive texts representing at least 3,000 works of art (a minimum of 500 from each participating museum) available on the campus networks of participating universities without site licenses or royalty fees during the 1995-96 academic year. Information on and images of 3,000 additional works will be added during the 1996-97 academic year. During this time, project participants will work in partnership to develop and test administrative, technical, and legal mechanisms that will enable the routine delivery of high-quality museum images and information to educational institutions. Participants will evaluate the uses of the materials on university campuses, define requirements and assess technological systems for network security, and develop a model site licensing agreement.
"We will never achieve the `virtual museum' of the future without a common framework of rights, permissions, and restrictions," said Karl Katz, director of MUSE Educational Media. "The collaborative nature of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project will ensure that the solutions it develops will meet the needs of both the museum and the educational communities, bridging the gap between image users and rights holders."
Participating organizations will contribute staff time and technical resources to the project. Together they will form an interdisciplinary team of experts in art history, instructional technology, museum collections documentation, and academic computing, ensuring that multiple points of view are represented. The works of art used in the study will be selected by the museums on the basis of criteria suggested by the universities, who have been encouraged to propose a wide variety of educational and research uses for the materials. Faculty from each university have committed to use the test images and data in at least one course in each academic year. Throughout the project, student use will be monitored and evaluated by experts in educational technology, providing concrete comparative data about the use of digital information as an educational tool.
"One of the main reasons we don't have on-line classrooms in the humanities and the arts like we do in the sciences and engineering is simply the lack of information available in digitalform," said Thomas Hickerson, director of the division of rare and manuscript collections at the Cornell University Library and a project participant. "We aren't going to see the resources devoted to developing large databases of material until we can demonstrate their value. The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project will push us toward those practical uses."
Planning and organization of the project is being funded by the Imaging Initiative of the Getty Art History Information Program, which will also provide some matching funds for project implementation. Additional funding will be sought from public and private foundations. The project has the support of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Association of Museums, and the Coalition for Networked Information.
"I consider this the first step to giving schools and libraries as well as home users on-line access to our collections across networks," said Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and chair of the Association of Art Museum Directors Information Technology Committee. "This extraordinary project will provide much needed information and solutions for the electronic future of America's cultural patrimony."
Since its beginnings in 1983, the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP) has made art-historical information more available to scholars and researchers through advanced computertechnology. In collaboration with domestic and international institutions and organizations, AHIP works at several levels of policy, standards, and practice to help shape the direction of automation in the arts and humanities. To meet the evolving needs of the art community, AHIP initiates and supports activities in four major areas: Issues and Policy, Standards and Resources, Research Database Projects, and Technical Development and Research. The Getty Art History Information Program is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. The other programs are the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, the Museum Management Institute, and the Getty Grant Program.
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PARTICIPATING INSTITUTIONS OF THE MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSING PROJECT
MUSEUMS The Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles The International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester The Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
UNIVERSITIES American University, Washington, D.C. Columbia University, New York Cornell University, Ithaca University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Maryland at College Park The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint The University of Virginia, Charlottesville
J. Trant Manager, Imaging Initiative Getty Art History Information Program mailto:jtrant@getty.edu phone: (310) 451-6381 fax: (310) 451-5570