The Art History Department's Visual Resources Collection is currently involved in an exciting new initiative with ARTstor. ARTstor is a digital library of almost one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities and the social sciences, and is available to the campus community through the Ithaca College Library's website [www.ithacalibrary.com/research/databases.php]. Beginning in Fall 2009, the VRC's own collection of almostt 20,000 digital images will be made available to the entire Ithaca College community through ARTstor's hosting program, for use by faculty and students across campus, both inside and outside the classroom. 

The hosting program allows the VRC to upload the Art History Department's teaching collection of images to ARTstor's site.  This will provide faculty with an even larger repository of images for teaching and student study, and also allow the department's images to be seamlessly integrated with ARTstor's vast collection, either via ARTstor's online presentation tools, or through its Offline Image Viewer. The VRC will continue to expand the department's digital image database and will be adding new images to the ARTstor repository on an ongoing basis.

From ARTstor:

ARTstor is working with over 90 participating institutions to host their local institutional collections on ARTstor servers. Hosted collections are available to students, faculty, and staff at participating institutions and allow them to access their own content alongside images from the ARTstor Digital Library.

The three-year Institutional Collections Pilot Program launched in 2004 and concluded fall 2007. The pilot phase demonstrated community interest in our hosting service and provided a representative sample of common visual resource collection management practices at a variety of institutions. We are now in Hosting Phase II (2008-2011) during which we continue to develop hosted collections but also focus on developing tools and workflows that more efficiently and effectively accommodate the needs of our community.

www.artstor.org