ARTstor ( www.artstor.org ) is a subscription-based service that includes 300,000 images (soon to be 500,000), mostly in the arts and humanities fields. Four UC campuses currently subscribe to ARTstor (Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Cruz). The UC Image Service ( imageservice.cdlib.org ) is a federated collection of licensed collections along with UC-owned image content, focusing on art, architecture, and the humanities. All faculty, staff, and students in the UC community have access to it.

ARTstor

The non-profit ARTstor Digital Library was created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation specifically for scholarly use. Its charter collection is partly based on UC San Diego's Art & Architecture collection of 35mm slides as well as on images from other university and museum collections in the arts and humanities.

According to Maureen Burns, Humanities Curator for UC Irvine's Visual Resources Collection, ARTstor is "well on its way to becoming the definitive digital image service for the history of art." However, its collections are also relevant to scholars in many non-arts fields.

"It probably should have been named IMAGEstor or something similar because it includes a lot more than art," says Kathryn Wayne, fine arts librarian of UC Berkeley's Doe Library. "English literature and history faculty are using it. And there's a wealth of information relating to women's studies."

Wayne says that ARTstor is especially useful because it contains a "critical mass" of images. "Mellon really focused on adding those images that people most need for teaching and scholarship," she says. "In fact, one faculty member at Berkeley emailed to tell me that within minutes he found in the ARTstor repository all of the images that he uses in his classes."

In addition to its vast breadth, ARTstor shows a lot of educational promise because of the high quality of its images and its presentation tools. The ability for users to add personal collections is also very useful for instructors who want to integrate their own images with those of the ARTstor collection. (ARTstor also allows universities to add their own institutional collections, but for a fee.)

Features that may encourage instructors to use ARTstor in the classroom include the ability to zoom in on specific parts of images at high resolutions and to display two images side by side or on top of each other. And the fact that this can be done offline might elicit a sigh of relief from instructors hesitant to rely on an Internet connection for teaching. The ARTstor software also creates image folders on the web, allowing students to visit the images for further study at their own convenience. (For examples of how some faculty are using ARTstor, read a recent Berkeleyan article .)

UC Image Service

The UC Image Service, which is hosted by UC's California Digital Library, includes over 350,000 images from licensed collections as well as from UC archives, libraries, museums, and visual resources collections. The UC libraries have shared the costs of licensing the image collections and the CDL is paying for consortial access to the Luna Insight software, which provides tools for finding and presenting images in the collections.

The UC Image Service has a strong emphasis on collections in Architecture (SPIRO and Hartill), the history of western art (AMICA and Saskia), California-specific content (MOAC and LUCI), and cartography (Rumsey Map Collection and UC Berkeley's Japanese Historical Maps).

The Luna Insight software is comparable to ARTstor's, allowing users to zoom in on details of images and to create classroom presentations. (The personal collection feature should be available to UC users for testing in January 2006). The UC Image Service has some additional features, however, such as allowing users to export images and presentations to other applications (such as PowerPoint), and tools for scale/measurement, flipping through multi-page documents, and easy web integration.

A formal assessment of the UC Image Service has not yet been conducted as the campuses are presently rolling it out (see list of campus advisors ). However, UC visual resources curators say anecdotally that the majority of faculty and graduate students who use it are mining for images to use in PowerPoint or on web sites. A smaller percentage use the Luna Insight software for classroom presentations, such as a Classics professor at Berkeley who can now give students a close look at Tebtunis Papyri during class.

What's the Difference Between the Two Services?

The ARTstor tools for finding and presenting images are by all accounts very easy to use. "ARTstor is easy enough to figure out on your own and there is comprehensive help and interactive training that you can set up on your computer," says Berkeley's Wayne. "It's extremely user friendly."

Irvine's Maureen Burns agrees but says the Luna Insight delivery and presentation tools are more sophisticated than ARTstor's, although they require some training to master. Both ARTstor and the UC Image Service offer online help.

Another difference is that users have to use ARTstor's bundled presentation tool whereas images from the UC Image Service can be exported to other applications such as PowerPoint, giving instructors the flexibility to decide how they want to present images.

As far as content of the collections, ARTstor currently focuses on the history of art and the humanities but has plans to expand to other disciplines. The UC Image Service currently focuses on architecture, the arts, and humanities but has the capacity to expand to other areas. (See list of collections accessible through the UC Image Service and ARTstor .

As faculty and students increasingly demand access to digital images, campus visual resources curators and librarians are heeding the call by exploring commercial products and creating their own local digital collections. They are currently conducting workshops and creating resource web sites to teach the UC community about image collections so that these rich resources enhance the teaching and learning experiences.