ARTstor Access Funded by Mellon Foundation Grant

Averett University and seven affiliated colleges in Virginia have received a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for acquisition of ARTstor, a digital library of nearly 550,000 images in art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. The Mellon Foundation created ARTstor in 2001 to provide museums and schools with digital access to original art. ARTstor became an independent, non-profit organization in January 2004.

ARTstor digital collections are now available on and off campus to Averett students, faculty, and staff, and on campus to visitors at the Mary B. Blount Library.

We encourage students and faculty to begin tapping this rich cultural source for teaching, learning and research. Interdisciplinary opportunities range from painting, sculpture, architecture and photography, to theatre, design, and music history; from religion and Asian or Middle Eastern studies to anthropology, African-American studies, and various branches of history. For more information, please consult the interdisciplinary guides at
http://www.artstor.org/using-artstor/u-html/interdisciplinary.shtml

In addition to its permanent collections, ARTstor offers PC and Macintosh-compatible tools to help faculty and students manage images and build personal collections for teaching and research. Each ARTstor image and image group has a stable URL that can be shared by email, embedded in a document, or linked from a course on Blackboard.

ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer (OIV) allows students and faculty to "create digital slide show presentations that enable side-by-side comparisons, zooming and panning, and the ability to customize text on the slides. You can download this software from within the database and use it with any image in the ARTstor Digital Library. Click here for OIV installation instructions (PDF).

If you are an Averett faculty member and do not receive email notification of your ARTstor faculty account with personal collection privileges, please contact elaine.day@averett to request this level of access. You will then be able to capture ARTstor images and contribute your own images for academic research, instruction, or sharing with colleagues at Averett and other institutions. You determine which ARTstor users have access to your personal collection.

Averett's license for ARTstor prohibits any commercial use of the images or their reproduction in campus publications, however you are free to download them for scholarly research, lectures, and class assignments.

For participants interested in scholarly publication, ARTstor currently provides rights to 1,700 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, free of charge.

Click here for access to the ARTstor database from the Averett University campus, or remotely, using your library login and password.

For assistance, contact the Averett Library Reference Desk.