We are pleased to announce the acquisition of ARTstor, made possible by the generous support of the USF Women’s Club.
ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. It was generously funded by the USF Women’s Club on behalf of all faculty, staff, and students at the University of South Florida. The name ARTstor is derived from JSTOR, a digital library initiative sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. This digital library of images consists of more than sixty collections that have been added for their teaching and research value. ARTstor has incorporated approximately eighty-five percent of the former AMICO library with more than 90,000 images from over twenty contributing museums. In addition to museums, ARTstor collections are comprised of contributions from individual photographers, scholars, special collections at libraries, and photo archives. Some of the significant collections within ARTstor include: images from the Library of Congress, the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, the Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection, Native American Art and Culture from the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution and the QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture. ARTstor collections are added regularly to improve the depth and breadth of the collection. There are plans for another 900,000 images to be added. Participating institutions are encouraged to enhance the content in ARTstor by contributing already digitized collections to ARTstor for use by all participating institutions.
ARTstor supports researchers both within the arts and in disciplines outside of the arts. This includes historians of art and architecture and others engaged with the visual arts, as well as individuals in fields as diverse as American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Literary Studies, Medieval Studies, Music, Religious Studies, and Renaissance Studies, all of whom should find the images in ARTstor to be relevant to their teaching and research.
There are set of recommended system requirements for the optimal use of ARTstor. The beta version of ARTstor was launched June, 2008 requiring the use of Internet Explorer version 7.0 and Firefox 2.0 and higher. Please consult the ARTstor web site for a detailed list of these requirements. NOTE: Popup blocking software must be disabled in order to open an image. An alternative to disabling this software is to hold down the “Ctrl” key as you click on image or link.
This resource comes with a set of tools to view, present and manage images for research and teaching. One can browse the content by collection, classification, geography; create groups of images and organize them in shared folders; upload personal image and sound files to ARTstor; export images; and export citations to RefWorks, EndNote, and ProCite. USF instructors can share ARTstor content through Blackboard to help students explore world art, architecture, and visual culture.
For this and other library databases, visit http://www.poly.usf.edu/Offices/Library.xml. Click on “Search the databases”.