Final Report on the Academic Image Exchange Appendix G.

As recommended by a review of the AIC's progress conducted on 20 April 2000

D Greenstein
23 April 2000

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Aims and objectives
4. Audiences
5. Scope of collections
6. Collection strategies
7. Collection methods
8. Selection criteria
9. Accessioning process
10. Data dissemination
11. Use scenarios
12. Data management
13. Rights framework
14. Organizational options
15. Participants in the review

G1. Introduction

The document outlines a collection strategy and development framework for the Academic Image Co-operative (AIC). It states the AIC's aims and objectives, and proposes strategies for developing, managing, and providing access to its collections. The document also outlines organizational options, and suggests immediate next steps. It grows out of a review of the AIC's progress since inception in January 1999 and supplies a route map for the Co-operative's further development and for the emergence of a business plan capable of sustaining the initiative. The document does not supply implementation guidelines. Rather it outlines key areas where implementation guidelines will need to emerge and proposes mechanisms for their development

Participants in the review are listed in appendix. They represent institutions that have had a stake in the AIC. Also included in the review were a number of art historians, visual resource professionals, and digital library specialists representing institutions who have a stake in the development and sustainability of the kind of initiative proposed by the AIC.

G2. Background

The AIC was initiated in January 1999 to enable a new kind of community building amongst art historians and visual resources professionals by facilitating the sharing and exchange of art history images and data over the Web. In its initial inception it aspired to be:

• a shared cataloging utility for the visual resource profession, from which image catalogers may freely derive cataloging records and to which image catalogers may also contribute such records readily;
• a shared image library created for and by the art history and visual resource community unconstrained by copyright restrictions; and
• affordable if not indeed made available free of charge for educational purposes

In these respects, the AIC was conceived as building on the work of individual art historians and visual resource professionals, especially a handful of individuals who have already sought to advance these same goals informally, as individuals and in small collaboratives. It sought, in effect, to "scale up" these efforts by enlisting:

• the direct participation of these individuals and groups;
• the support of institutions such as the Yale Library and Carnegie Mellon University; and
• the support of professional organizations such as the DLF and CAA, the project's two institutional sponsors to date.

In its first year, the AIC tested its ability to achieve these goals by focusing initially upon heavily-subscribed, widely-taught art history courses, beginning in the first instance with the standard art history survey. Briefly, it:

• developed a list of the so -called "consensus core" - that is, some 2,300 objects that are commonly referred to in at least two of the 10 leading text books that are currently in use in teaching the survey;
• acquired and processed some 800 images of public domain objects that are represented in the core;
• developed prototype software capable of supporting web-based search, retrieval, and presentation functions appropriate to art history teaching;
• demonstrated the prototype at public meetings of a number of relevant professional societies as a means of ensuring that key stakeholders and potential users had some input into the AIC's development.

In developing and presenting the prototype, a number of strategic questions emerged about the AIC's core aims and objectives, its collection scope, collection development strategies, and about its approaches to data management and distribution. Significant questions were also raised the organizational model most likely to sustain and potentially scale the AIC's activities over a longer period.

The purpose of the review was to examine these questions in light of the AIC's experiences to date and in the presence of a range of stakeholders with an interest in developing and maintaining a community-based initiative committed to facilitating information exchange and resource sharing amongst art historian and visual resource professionals.

The review was guided by a discussion document that provided some structure around the numerous strategic questions that had arisen for the AIC. The document's structure was based on a policy framework for developing and maintaining digital collections. Its contents were tailored explicitly to the distinctive needs and experiences of the AIC and its key stake-holding communities.

This document provides a summary of the review.

G3. Aims and objectives

The AIC aims to:

• facilitate the development and maintenance of a shared educational resource comprising catalogue records and digital surrogates for art historical objects;
• support and encourage educational use of this shared resource in teaching and life-long learning both in art history and other disciplines; and
• empower visual resource professionals and art historians to take full advantage of their intellectual and image assets.

To achieve these aims the AIC will:

• develop a shared repository of catalogue records and digital surrogates for art historical objects that support teaching and life long learning in art history and other disciplines;
• use the Worldwide web and other electronic means to develop the repository and to make it accessible for educational purposes, ensuring wherever possible, that some access is maintained free of charge or at the lowest possible cost for bona fide educational uses;
• document and disseminate guidance that may help the art historical and visual arts communities take maximum advantage of computer technologies, emerging methods for developing scaleable and sustainable digital collections, and the law to capitalize on their intellectual and image assets for the good of their respective professions; and
• adopt an organizational structure that distributes the costs involved in developing, maintaining, and disseminating the resource while leveraging existing investment in appropriate computing infrastructure and online services.

G4. Audiences

The AIC seeks through its activities to serve the following communities:

• teachers and students of art history and other disciplines that make pedagogical use of art historical objects;
• art historians, visual resource professionals, and others with an interest in realizing the aggregated value of the numerous high-quality surrogates that exist in the public domain or can be cleared of copyright-based constraints; and
• visual resource professionals and institutions with an interest in sharing the effort involved in developing and maintaining catalogue records pertaining to art historical objects.

G5. Scope of collections

The AIC seeks to develop a shared repository of digital images and catalogue records pertaining to art historical objects that are used for teaching in art history and other disciplines.

G6. Collection strategies

The AIC's collection strategy reflects its community-building aims. It is envisaged as a distributed effort amongst art historians and visual resource professionals who seek to reap collective educational reward from their individual image resources and expertise.

Rather than simply amassing image content and catalogue records, the AIC will provide a framework for the development of discrete collections that serve specific and definable teaching and learning needs. Although there is little doubt that the AIC's collections may become an important reference tools for research and other specialist needs, their evolution is intended to parallel that of traditional slide libraries which have historically grown in response to curricular need.

For images, the AIC will seek to leverage community-owned resources while avoiding copyright obstacles that have hindered the development of comprehensive image collections. It will focus primarily on images of objects in the public domain. It will also accession in-copyright images where it may readily and without cost obtain a license to distribute such images for educational purposes and for the development of educational services and products. For both kinds of images, the AIC will rely principally on voluntary contributions from institutions and individuals that possess them. It will also develop mechanisms that facilitate such contributions being made while minimizing the costs involved in their transaction.

For cataloguing content, the AIC will rely upon the distributed effort of visual resource professionals. Here, too, it will develop mechanisms that facilitate that shared effort and help to reduce its inherent redundancy.

The AIC will focus on discrete collections that have definable uses in art history teaching. It will begin with the so-called concordance core - that is, the images and associated catalogue records that relate to the c.2,300 art historical objects that are referenced in at least two of the ten leading textbooks used in teaching the survey of art.

Contingent upon its success with the concordance core, the AIC may develop additional teaching collections as may be determined by an editorial board of art historians and visual resource professionals.

G7. Collection methods

The AIC will be pro-active in developing collections that serve specific and definable teaching needs. It will prioritize effort applied to such collections in consultation with an editorial board and in response to collection development opportunities as they arise.

Initially, the AIC will start with the so-called concordance core. Contingent upon its ability to sustain its activities, it will turn to other collections, for example, as appropriate to teaching Southeast Asian, Renaissance Architecture, German Expressionism, etc.

The development of collections that meet discrete teaching needs is likely to occur in overlapping phases:

• development of a want list of art historical objects required for a collection (including acceptable substitute objects);
• accession or creation of catalogue records for objects on the want list; and
• identification and accession of appropriate public domain images or in-copyright images that may be licensed to the AIC.

The AIC will not normally seek to acquire image or catalogue content through subscription, licensing or other fee-paying means.

The AIC will invest in the creation of image content where appropriate and where sufficient external funding may be found for this purpose.

To implement its collection development methods, the AIC will require:

• An editorial board comprising visual resource professionals and art historians acting as commissioning agents and as gatekeepers. As commissioning agents, board members will assist in defining and developing discrete collections, and in raising whatever external funding may be require to achieve these tasks. As gatekeepers, editorial board members will help to review and prioritize image surrogates, catalogue content, and collection development ideas as they are offered to the AIC.
• Robust and manageable communications channels that connect the editorial board to a broader community of visual resource professionals and art historians. These channels may be used to solicit catalogue records and appropriate image content, as well as ideas about potential collection development opportunities. Members of the wider community may also use these channels to bring image content, catalogue records, and collection development ideas unsolicited, to the attention of the AIC.
• Technical and other means for facilitating shared development of catalogue records, in particular by exploiting the online catalogues that exist or are in development in stake-holding institutions.
• Technical and other means for facilitating direct transmission of digital image surrogates.

G8. Selection criteria

Selection criteria need to be developed in order to:

• prioritize AIC efforts in developing discrete teaching collections;
• ensure consistency and quality across image content and catalogue records derived from numerous sources;
• ensure that costs involved in developing any collection are predictable and minimized wherever possible; and
• provide guidelines to and create realistic expectations amongst potential contributors of image content and catalogue records.

Selection criteria will need to be developed to guide decisions regarding the teaching collections that may be developed and the catalogue records and surrogate images that may be included in such collections.

Guidelines pertaining to selection of specific teaching collections are likely to emphasize opportunity and costs.

Guidelines pertaining to the image content and catalogue records that will make up a collection are likely to focus on:

• the scope of the specific teaching collection;
• benchmark image quality, format, and resolution;
• copyright status of image content and catalogue records;
• suitability of image content and catalogue records for teaching and learning;
• benchmark structure, format, and contents of catalogue records; and
• costs of accessioning image surrogates or catalogue record into the AIC collection.

G9. Accessioning process

The accessioning process is that by which image content and catalogue records are created and/or prepared for inclusion in a distributable collection. At least four accessioning scenarios are envisaged:

• for image surrogates that do not yet exist in digital format;
• for image surrogates that do already exist in digital format;
• for existing catalogue records; and
• for the production of catalogue records where no suitable records exist.

The effort involved in accessioning will depend upon the source, format, location, etc. of image content and catalogue records and may extend to include:

• negotiation and receipt of appropriately signed and authorized licenses for image content and catalogue records;
• acquisition of non-digital image content for scanning according to agreed formats, and benchmark standards of quality, resolution, etc.;
• acquisition of digital images and their manipulation to achieve agreed formats, and benchmark standards of quality, resolution, etc.;
• acquisition, review, and where necessary amendment of existing catalogue records or, alternatively, creation of appropriate catalogue records; and
• entry of processed digital images and catalogue records into a distributable database or databases.

In order to assure quality and consistency across its image content and catalogue records, the AIC will agree the following standards and develop implementation guidelines to govern their application:

• boilerplate licenses;
• a range of acceptable formats for images contributed to the AIC (whether in digital or non-digital formats), including benchmark standards of quality, resolution, etc.;
• a minimum requirement pertaining to the structure and contents of catalogue records contributed to the AIC;
• standard image format(s) including benchmark standards of quality, resolution etc. for post-processed digital image content (that is image content considered to be ready for inclusion in the corpus to be distributed by the AIC); and
• standards for the structure and minimum level content required for post-processed catalogue records (that is catalogue records considered ready for inclusion in the corpus to be distributed by the AIC).

In order to implement its accessioning process, the AIC will require support from at least one but possibly more centers that agree to act in conformance with AIC accessioning standards and implementation guidelines. Should the AIC rely entirely on one center, the center would need to support all of the accessioning scenarios and accessioning functions described above. Support from more than one center promises to introduce economies of scale and would allow individual centers to concentrate on specific accessioning scenarios and functions (e.g. on the receipt, amendment, or production of catalogue records; on processing digital image surrogates; on digitizing image surrogates contributed in non-digital formats; etc.).

In seeking support from accessioning centers, the AIC would expect to leverage existing expertise and infrastructure.

G10. Data dissemination

The AIC's collections may be distributed by multiple third parties acting under license to the AIC. Such third parties may include universities, libraries, or other organizations that host the AIC's collections and make them available for educational use whether to specific user communities or to a broader public.

This distributed strategy will enable the AIC to leverage existing investments in appropriate infrastructure and may mitigate the need for the AIC to maintain such an infrastructure of its own.

G11. Use scenarios

The AIC will encourage licensed distributors to support use scenarios that meet their users' distinctive needs. In this way, the AIC will encourage different presentations of its collections as is appropriate for the many different communities of potential users.

The AIC will require that at least some of its licensed distributors make the collections available according to some minimum level criteria determining look, feel, functionality, and access conditions. Here, preference may be given to a one-size fits all approach providing, for example:

• free access at least to low-resolution images and brief catalogue records;
• simple search and retrieval functions operating across the brief catalogue records;
• some slide-table and side-by-side presentation features;
• support for exchange of catalogue recores; and
• etc.

G12. Data management

The third parties that are acting to distribute the AIC's collections will be expected to manage the collections according to some specified criteria. Such criteria will be developed and specified in licenses between the AIC and its distributors or in schedules that may attach to those licenses.

A distributed dissemination strategy may also require that at least one distributing site be designated as the primary site responsible for:

• receiving initial updates and amendments to the AIC's collections and additions to those collections;
• disseminating updates, amendments, and additions to other licensees; and
• acting as the collection of record for the AIC.

G13. Rights framework

The AIC is an educational resource. In particular, it is a collection of digital images and catalogue records that are distributed for educational use and for the development of educational services and products.

The AIC is also a community resource. It derives principally from two sources:

• from image content and catalogue records in the public domain; and
• from in-copyright image content and catalogue records that are licensed by copyright holders to the AIC.

The AIC derives from a philosophy that believes that educational and cultural organizations should not sell their intellectual and information assets to third parties, especially where such sale results in those organizations having to reacquire access to those assets at some additional cost. The AIC does not, therefore, seek exclusive ownership of or license to the image content and catalogue records that make up its collections. Nor does it seek to profit from exploitation of those assets.

The AIC also recognizes the cost involved in maintaining high-quality information resources and information services, and, indeed, in maintaining distributed, community-based efforts.

The AIC requires a rights framework and associated licenses that reflect these understandings and support its mission. In particular, the framework and licenses must:

• safeguard the rights and interests of those who contribute in-copyright material to the AIC;
• give the AIC the right to distribute its collections via third parties and to reap the economic and other advantages that stem from this approach; and
• give the AIC the financial flexibility to generate revenues sufficient to maintaining and where possibly enhancing its collections.

As part of this rights framework the AIC will require a number of licenses including licenses: between the AIC and those who contribute image content or catalogue records to its collections; between the AIC and those who act under license to distribute its collections; between distributors of AIC content and the end users who access that content.

Although it is expected that licenses will be negotiated independently, it is hoped that licenses of any one type will reflect principals agreed for that time and may be derived from boiler-plates. A draft of the principles that may apply to the types of licenses listed above are set out here.

Licenses between the AIC and its contributors

The AIC will typically develop contributor licenses for in-copyright collections of images or catalogue records rather than for individual in-copyright images or catalogue records.

The AIC will typically require contributors to determine the copyright status of the image content and catalogue records they supply and where necessary, to clear any copyrights in that image content and catalogue records.

The AIC will typically only accept image content or catalogue records whose copyright status is known to contributors.

The AIC will typically accept image content and catalogue records of known copyright status and that are either in the public domain or owned exclusively by the contributor.

Where in-copyright image content or catalogue records are concerned, the AIC will typically only accept such content where it can be licensed to the AIC at no charge for distribution by the AIC or by licensed third parties, for the purposes of educational use or for the development of educational products and services.

The AIC will typically only accept in-copyright image content and catalogue records where it may be licensed to distribute such content on a cost-recovery basis in the interest of maintaining and developing the AIC as an educational service and information resource.

The AIC will not typically seek permission to distribute in-copyright image content or catalogue records on a for-profit basis.

The AIC will not typically seek to obtain exclusive distribution rights in or ownership of any in-copyright image content or catalogue records.

The AIC will typically seek to assure its contributors that it will adopt all reasonable means to protect their rights as vested in the image content or catalogue records they contribute, and to enforce a similar obligation onto any third party to which the AIC licenses the right to distribute its collections.

Given AIC's preference for contributors who take responsibility for determining the copyright status of their image content or catalogue records, it will need to take on an educational role and provide guidance to contributors about rights issues that are likely to be associated with any image content or catalogue records in their possession

Licenses between the AIC and its distributors

Forthcoming.

Licenses between distributors and end users

Forthcoming.

G14. Organizational options

The AIC should be maintained as a distributed organization comprising:

• Individuals and institutions willing and able to contribute image content and catalogue records.
• Accessioning centers that agree to manage receipt of and process contributed image content and catalogue records.
• Distribution centers acting under license to the AIC to disseminate its collections for educational use or for the development of educational services and products.
• An editorial or advisory board comprising visual resource professionals and art historians.
• Some corporate entity capable of managing funds and of licensing contributed content and dissemination centers.

Accessioning centers are likely to be self-selecting and include those institutions that are already involved in developing collections of digital image content.

Distribution centers are likely to be self-selecting and include institutions with an interest in developing and maintaining online image services.

At least two options exist for giving the AIC the requisite corporate status.

• An existing corporate body (e.g. the ACLS, CLIR, etc.) acts on behalf of the AIC.
• The AIC incorporate as a not-for-profit corporate entity.
• The former option is preferred.

G15. Participants in the review

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