Acadmic Image Cooperative. Reports on initial meetings held in January and May 1999

Following introductions, Don Waters provided an overview of the Digital Library Federation and Max Marmor provided background on the meetings evolution. Presentations during the morning were made by:

Christine Sundt on the Image Directory locator service that provides an online catalog of art image information and related images when provided. Initiated by a request from Getty, the service is supported by Academic Press, a division of Harcourt-Brace. Data is provided in digital or hard copy formats with data mapped to template based on MARC and CDWA. Currently database contents represent the work of 125 data providers. Images provided are stored in low resolution, 72 dpi and can incorporate digital watermarking or encryption. Access is subscription based on site license basis or to individuals. According to Christine, the web-site is being redesigned and is not currently accessible. Image Directory is currently negotiating with a bay area producer of scholarly information on a new project to start in September 1999, and there is discussion on the possible inclusion of bio-medical information and images.

Jeff Cohen, Paula Behrens and Michilene Nilsen on the Society of Architectural Historians Image Exchange providing architectural images for non-profit and educational use. Project is sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians but maintained on servers at Bryn Mawr and Penn. Initially the site started with images of American architectural landmarks identified in more than one of four survey textbooks. It was subsequently expanded to include world landmarks that were identified in more than one of three world architecture survey courses. Images are organized and searched according to historical time periods. Noteworthy is the limited copyright issues as many of the images provided are the personal work of faculty. In addition, the database includes works from the 1905 Bannister and Fletcher publication that is no longer under copyright. Image resolution currently based on screen of 640 X 480 with possibility of additional option for higher resolution option. Future plans include expanding the database to include collections based on specific periods or styles and geographical sites.

Allan Kohl on Art Images for College Teaching provides art history images for educational use. The site is divided into five specific periods organizationally based on survey texts. Minneapolis College of Art and Design provides server space and webmaster assistance. A concordance is provided with each image page reflecting the images inclusion in identified texts. Downloading of images is supported at two different resolutions and images are also made available on photo CD and slides.

Policy is one of open contribution and use as long as intent is educational and/or non-profit.

Current direction appears to have been to build collection(s) based on a corpus of survey texts, which are monument driven using images from the public domain or with copyright donated.

If this is for survey courses, then need to identify what is needed to support that focus and to maximize access to users. To minimize intellectual property issues best to focus on that which is already in the public domain that would include pre-20^th century European and US prior to 1923.

If content is the priority then limiting the amount of data input for each image will insure the breadth of content.

Suggestion was made to incorporate peer review process into site (as has been done with physics e-print) with assistance provided and/or solicited by experts at participating institutions. Data submissions could be provided or input in a specified format to insure minimum data requirements as well as presently guidelines for data syntax. Processing controls could then be setup to filter accordingly with images then reviewed. Is it necessary/preferable to be able to define and therefore search discrete collections?

CAA Lantern project works - are they available and in what format? Does CAA hold the rights to these? Can these be incorporated into the project as they represent a large collection of images. It would be beneficial as well to understand the process by which the original project was organized.

Brief mention of areas of concern: support structures for maintenance and infrastructure. Proposed that ongoing support would be provided by supporting/participating institutions much along the lines of the DLF.

What work is needed? A design day or days to develop database and interface designs. Possible participants identified as Columbia, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon with other participants being CAA, the three group members who have agreed to working on portions of the concordance. Max could possibly fund onsite design day at Yale. CAA could possibly provide legal assistance.

American, Ancient and Classical, Meso-American and Islamic : will be done by Susan, Alan and Michelline

Editorial selection of art history survey texts

Create concordance based on number of inclusions (same basis as SAH)

Dimensions beyond standard survey courses that will vary according to institutions

Master/derivative model

If DLF made a financial contribution of $10-15k, what additional tasks would the group identify

In addition, could possibly tie-in to work being done at Columbia which is in the first year of a three year grant funded by Mellon working on digital images and core curriculum

The DLF Academic Image Exchange Meeting
("The Barnraising")
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, May 22-23, 1999
Robert Baron and Lena Stebley

In May 1999, a group of academic representatives met at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, under the aegis of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), to plan the implementation of the Academic Image Exchange (AIE). AIE is the working title of a DLF project to develop a digital network of art historical images for academic and general use. The group that met in May came together as a result of two earlier meetings. The first in the New Haven, Connecticut, offices of the DLF, when DLF Director Don Waters, Yale Arts Library Director Max Marmor, Yale Visual Resources Curator Susan Williams, former University of Pennsylvania Visual Resources Curator Micheline Nilsen, and University of Pennsylvania Fine Arts Librarian, William Keller originated the AIE proposal. The second meeting, exploratory in focus, was held in New York on January 8, 1999.

Other individuals who have done work in this area or who have useful expertise were then invited to join the planning effort, and Robert Baron, arts information consultant and chair of the College Art Association's Intellectual Property Committee, was asked to become the AIE project manager. The May 1999 meeting produced an action plan and timetable expected to result in an AIE working prototype implemented on the World Wide Web by about September 1999. The AIE effort is supported by DLF and by the College Art Association (CAA). Apart from the CAA, no attempt has been made to align the membership of this planning group with that of any other organization, and the group anticipates exploring the possibility of broadening participation, especially among members of the Digital Library Federation.

The AIE project is intended as a response to the crisis that has overcome the administration and use of academic visual resources, which are described by Don Waters in his introductory remarks at the May 1999 meeting. This crises arises on one hand, from the parochial tradition of creating unshared catalogs, and on the other hand, from the advancing claims of those who hold economic interests in images of use to academia. Earlier projects aimed at providing teachers with digital images never fully succeeded in accomplishing their mission because they failed to realize that the traditional development of visual resource collections is driven by the demands of teachers and their curricula and not by repositories and museums bent on marketing their own collections.

The ubiquity of the art history survey and the popularity of specialized courses in this discipline suggest that an investment in a shared pool of digital art history survey images for both nonprofit educational and unrestricted public use will result in a substantial educational benefit and unquestionable institutional savings. The mission of AIE is to reflect the needs of the teaching community, which is why the group gathered in May 1999 was composed of visual resources curators, art and architecture historians and photographers, librarians, and other academics.

There are several reasons why the history of art serves as the ideal environment for the development of a networked image access system. Most importantly, among scholarly disciplines, the history of art is probably the most highly dependent upon the need to access and present a large corpus of high quality images. Today, in the visual resources collections of libraries and art history departments everywhere, collections of images are mostly redundant and are often compromised by the high costs of acquisition, of cataloging (also redundant), and of resource management (including replacements due to loss, damage and aging). Concern that the traditional acquisition technique for new materials (photocopying from published books) may not pass the legal hurdles of the fair use statute has caused some colleges and universities to cease what they fear may be questionable image acquisition activities.

Visual resources collections in libraries and art history departments are now experimenting with creating digital collections, but, in doing so, they are replicating and inheriting many of the inefficiencies that were a necessary part of maintaining repositories of analog images. Uncertainties surrounding the ability to share both analog and digital resources have erected de facto barriers to effective communication between institutions and individuals, and, indeed, have caused such institutions to erect electronic walls for the sole purpose of keeping inquisitive eyes away from protected materials. The sooner a universal and uniform resource of usable images becomes available to all, the sooner art history and related studies will be able to benefit from the simplified access such a repository promises.

In service to the teaching and practice of the history of art and related fields, and as a means by which the benefits of networked technologies may be introduced to teachers and scholars, AIE intends to offer students, teachers, and the public, curriculum-based sets of digital images for their free and unrestricted use. The first set of images to be introduced will satisfy a significant portion of the image requirements of most college- and university-level introductory courses in art history.

Beginning with works licensed for unencumbered use that have been made available by what the AIE group expects to be an increasing number of faculty photographers, and supplemented by images culled from the public domain, AIE offerings will be cataloged online and made available on the World Wide Web through a database and an indexed concordance. The concordance is a tool through which users may select works that correspond to images used in the standard textbooks. From this beginning, the AIE group envisions offering an ever-widening array of pedagogically selected images. These are to be accessed, displayed, and presented by a variety of software tools specifically fashioned to serve AIE user communities, which will allow teachers to edit, save, and create image sets for lectures, distance education, and online study guides.

After mounting an initial set of key works and the concordance, the development of additional image acquisition sources will receive a high priority, with the AIE database as a possible vehicle for publishing a want list [or wish list] of sought-after images. Among potential donors will be museums (including academic museums) wishing to offer teaching quality images, scholar-photographers and architects with significant private collections, libraries and archives holding stores of public domain monographs and photograph collections, teachers, and the occasional tourist. The AIE group is hopeful that the success of the enterprise will encourage those who own copyright of modern works to offer at least low-resolution versions of their holdings. Publishers of textbooks, especially those indexed in the concordance, will likely find that the AIE system supplements their offerings and gives them new ways to package their products. Ultimately, the AIE group hopes to encourage publishers to offer for limited use by AIE, copyrighted materials created for their editions, specifically maps, timelines, reconstructions, and plans.

Because one of the goals of AIE is to encourage institutions to provide the requisite infrastructure to allow digital images to be used in the classroom, AIE is proposing to create a critical mass of high quality images and cataloging data, enough to mount a course and to author networked distance education products. Under most circumstances, these images will be available at no cost to scholars, to nonprofit educational institutions, and to the general public. Because many of the images have been provided by photographers who have licensed their free use for nonprofit educational purposes, many of the constraints faced by those who must clear permission to use copyrighted works will no longer apply. In addition the AIE expects to offer tools to permit teachers to edit, save, and create image sets for lectures, distance education, and on-line study guides.

Under a fully operational digital image system, faculty need not pull slides each time they present a previously given lecture, and images will always be available because they will no longer need to hoard slides from other faculty. Curators will not need to re-file, repair, and replace slides. In general, less time will be devoted to maintenance and administration and more time to course preparation and collection development.

The concordance structure envisaged for AIE will serve as a crucial aid to digital teaching because it replicates the image sequences and organizations used in standard texts. In the classroom, any teacher with an open line to the Internet or who has access to a local replica of the AIE site will be able to show any AIE works on the spot without having planned to do so in advance. The concordance will allow teachers to browse the image set in art-historical order and/or in textbook order. As a consequence, teaching will be able to be more responsive to the needs of the moment and to suggestions coming from the class.

This openness will be supported by a universal cataloging environment that will not change from institution to institution. Teachers will be able to take their knowledge of the system with them as their professional lives move from one school to another. Indeed, they will be able to transport their entire curricula and its illustrative program as they evolve and move.

Because the technology needed to use digital images in the classroom is not yet broadly familiar to art historians, the AIE group realizes that the AIE product must provide sufficient educational materials to ease some of the expected initial hesitation that inhibits busy people from experimenting with new technologies. The educational program that will be part of AIE will consist of gathering together resources such as articles about using digital images for teaching, reviews of equipment and software, and such technical literature and practical advice that might ease a department's or faculty member's path into this technology. These materials will be available through the front page of AIE Web site. They will be publicized to potential beneficiaries through the session on electronic teaching featured at the annual meeting of the College Art Association an AIE sponsor. This "magic classroom" session will begin to feature applications of the Academic Image Exchange beginning in 2000.

Other educational byproducts that the AIE group proposes to develop include pedagogical tools useful to faculty and students working with digital images. Such tools may include (a) sorting and set-up software (virtual slide-tables), (b) displayware that will facilitate the traditional A-B Carousel comparison technique for classroom projection, and (c) software tools that offer the ability to store and re-edit image sequences used in class.

Part of AIE's goal is to show that online access and free downloads offer benefits and savings that cannot be duplicated by any analog collection of images. Some of these benefits will be achieved through the educational program built into the AIE Web site. Others can be shown to be attributable directly to the system under which this digital image program exists. The promised benefits would be the result of efficiencies of scale. What might appear to be an unnecessarily expensive program when undertaken by one department becomes valuable, efficient, and pedagogically useful when many individuals and departments use it. Of equal significance is the fact that the use of XML (extensible markup language) in the development of the AIE's Web presence will permit others to create specialized tools that work with the AIE data and images.

The program proposed by the AIE group will justify faculty investment in acquiring technology skills and give universities confidence to invest in the technology infrastructure required for successful teaching with digital images. Furthermore, AIE activities will help create an expanding pool of skilled personnel and will build an infrastructure that can be used at low cost by disciplines whose needs for visual resources might not, if they had to stand alone, justify such an investment.

As the Academic Image Exchange provides a transition to twenty-first century networked access to images, it also expects to develop communities of devoted academic users for whom the AIE service will become the intended repository of their own image and photographic collections. To this end, too, the AIE group expects to develop procedures and tools that ease the donor's and editor's work.

The May 1999 meeting brought together at CMU four of the five original team-DLF head Don Waters, Yale staff Marmor and Williams, and former UPenn staff Nilsen-along with DLF Research Associate Rebecca Graham, AIE project manager Robert Baron, CAA representative Katie Hollander, and nine others. In all, nine campuses across the country were represented: CMU, Yale, Community College of Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr, San Jose State University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Reed College, and University of Oregon. Three of these are also members of Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Image Exchange. Robert Thibadeau, director of CMU's Imaging Systems Laboratory, also attended and invited three other CMU experts to make technical presentations.

*Robert Baron, Arts Information Consultant; Chair of Intellectual Property Committee, CAA; Project Manager for DLF AIE

*Paula Behrens, Community College of Philadelphia (SAH Image Exchange)

*Jeff Cohen, Bryn Mawr (SAH Image Exchange)

*Kathleen Cohen, Professor of Art History, San Jose State University

*Erin Glendening, [no title?] CMU

*Rebecca Graham, Digital Library Federation, Research Associate

*Katie Hollander, Director of Development and Special Projects, College Art Association

*Allan Kohl, Professor of Art History, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (Art Images for College Teaching)

*Max Marmor, Director, Arts Library, Yale University

*Micheline Nilsen, former Visual Resources Curator, University of Pennsylvania (SAH Image Exchange)

*Henry Pisciotta, CMU Arts Library

*Charles Rhyne, Professor of Art History, Reed College

*Lena Stebley, Kress Fellow, Arts Library, Yale University

*Christine Sundt, Visual Resources Curator, University of Oregon

Don Waters, Director, Digital Library Federation, Coordinator

*Susan Jane Williams, Visual Resources Curator, Yale University

Bob Burger, programmer, advanced imaging server architecture

John Nestor, database programmer, expert in relational databases and object-oriented databases

Michael Shamos, Principal Systems Scientist, Language Technologies Institute, and intellectual property attorney

Robert Thibadeau, Director, Imaging Systems Laboratory, The Robotics Institute

Handouts made available to the group included the meeting agenda, drawn up by Robert Baron, his Straw Man System Designs, Allan Kohl's Art History Image Exchange Project, and three papers by Kathleen Cohen, Mapped Field Lists, Data Entry Object Records, and Portfolios for the World Art Database.

The two-day session was structured as a series of discussions relating to presentations made by Robert and by Bob and his invited guests, which included John Nestor, a well-known authority on relational and object oriented database systems. Robert presented a system composed of entity relationship diagrams, a mock-up of a Web interface with query forms and reports, and a variety of procedural diagrams. He termed it a "straw man" system because its forms were designed to identify the boundaries between what could be acknowledged as acceptable and unacceptable procedures, and its purpose was to provoke discussion by providing a platform upon which the committee could articulate its varying points of view regarding the AIE mission and design. This process would enable the group to come to the policy decisions it needed to make in order to implement the AIE project.

In their presentations, Professors Thibadeau and Nestor put forward a proposal that the AIE system should be built on extensible markup language (XML), a technology that they said would at once ease development and help develop the community of users the AIE group seeks. They and the other CMU faculty also answered specific technical issues.

Project Manager Baron signaled that he expected the meeting to achieve several tangible goals: to decide upon an economic model, to define the community it serves, and to define those tasks that will lead the group to develop a software platform upon which to manifest this economic model. The overriding purpose of the CMU meeting was to leave with (1) a plan for further action, (2) a way to create a concordance, and (3) a plan to create a tangible, if experimental, presence on the Web, with enough features implemented and with a sufficient number of images to offer value to its first users. During the course of the meeting, the group came to realize that the educational component of the AIE product was as important as the economic model and the software platform.

The group should also consider the rights and privileges of different types of users and their relationship to the image service.

Robert asserted that the technical and structural issues affecting implementation were to be understood as reflecting differing agendas and missions held by working group members. Earlier, in his introduction, Don Waters had invited the group to use these differences as positive and creative forces that can be used to improve the AIE product and make it more useful. The group succeeded in meeting that challenge.

Robert walked the group through his straw man project design and procedural flow charts. In this design, Robert defined users as unregistered, nonprofit, and for-profit, with different privileges pertaining to the nonprofit and for-profit groups.

John Nestor discussed the benefits of using an open system architecture and suggested that XML be used to present the Academic Image Exchange project on the World Wide Web. XML, a derivative of SGML, can be used as a format for presenting the contents of a structured document on the Web and for creating an environment suitable for the development of a variety of user tools. For AIE purposes, one of the primary benefits of XML would be that it enables any user to build custom applications with which to store, search, and format any data following a common tag set.

John discussed using RDF (Resource Description Framework) with XML. He described RDF as XML with additional interpretation. He provided URLs for the XML and RDF standards documented on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Web site, http://www.w3c.org/XML and http://www.w3c.org/RDF. By publishing an XML tag set for the AIE, he suggested, the AIE project may be able to establish a de facto standard for similar databases, thereby promoting the emergence of a community of related online databases, while increasing the probability that the AIE site will be found and used by searchers who may not be familiar with the AIE service. The success of such an enterprise requires the AIE system to be (1) open (so that users can build onto it) and (2) extensible (to permit it to evolve and be adaptable). As related products appear on the Web, AIE could also be (3) distributed (to encourage participation and to use the Web to create community).

For the AIE, XML can be used to offer the contents of almost any database the AIE group chooses and will support the variable-length/repeating field set specifications required. Unfortunately, because XML can use distributed resources, it is possible to lose linked information taken from elsewhere. Professor Nestor did emphasize, therefore, the importance of being confident in the stability of linked resources.

The group was generally interested in the XML and RDF architecture, but in part was wary that the use of XML might not sufficiently differentiate the AIE site from other less authoritative offerings. Professors Nestor and Thibadeau assured the group that the name-space paradigm of XML offers casual visitors a way to differentiate the AIE works from others.

Bob Thibadeau, on behalf of the School of Computer Science at CMU, offered to provide free space on the school's server for AIE use. The amount of space available can be measured in terabytes. He estimated he could provide space for up to 50,000 relatively high-resolution images. Bob Thibadeau stated that this system would be free to AIE as long as the server was at CMU. He estimated providing this service at a minimal cost of $300 or $400 (in contrast to the $20,000 that CMU charges for-profit organizations).

Guest speaker Bob Burger presented a server model optimized for efficiently delivering large numbers of images on the Web. His system stores only the original high-level scan. Based on access rules and programmed policies, it would deliver derivative images on the fly. By referring to system profile data that local users provide, this server could perform unique custom color correction for each user, an important asset for art historical and connoisseurship studies. To set up the image server at CMU, Bob Thibadeau requires the metadata specifications and XML tags.

Intellectual property attorney Michael Shamos confirmed the group's assumptions that the project needed written agreements from contributors, and that it would be wise to carry liability insurance against claims of infringement. Contributors would not readily agree to accept liability, and asking them to do so would be a strong disincentive to contribute images. Nonetheless, contributors should be required to indicate that to their knowledge the rights to their images are not defective. Mr. Shamos offered a draft a model for a contributor's contract that included the following key clauses:

The group agreed on a mission statement and discussed and took decisions concerning a number of project design issues, including the target audience, producing income, the concordance design, image acquisition and Web submission, image format and downloading, labor, and right to image use.

After a day of intense discussion, the group drafted a preliminary mission statement based upon Don Waters' opening remarks:

Build a quality database of digital images.
Enable free access for nonprofit educational purposes.
Create and enable others to create a rich set of applications.
Build community through the use of shared resources.
Create want lists for the database and solicit from individuals and institutions images for the exchange.
Offer a model for shared cataloging.
Develop applications for users and user communities.

The group agreed that it should proceed to develop a concordance-based Web-mounted database of images composed of the current holdings of group members. Search and retrieval tools should be simple enough for students to use without confusion. The group agreed that revenue can be generated by creating access tools, editing tools, and other applications customized for its various user groups. Membership plans should be developed that do not compromise the mission to offer license-free images.

There was considerable interest (with some qualifications) in endorsing the use of the XML approach to open architecture as a means of creating and attracting a community of users and as a beginning to creating standards for shared cataloging. The entity relationship model is to be based on the plan offered by Robert Baron. The data dictionary for art work (object) description will be based on the core fields developed by the Visual Resources Association (VRA) as implemented by Susan Jane Williams at Yale.

After initial reluctance to ask nonprofit users to register, participants agreed that registration was important to track and record the activities of different types of users and realized that registration was a prerequisite to offering advanced services. Tracking information and statistical data was in any case needed to apply for funding and for other fundraising efforts.

While the group agreed that the target audience was higher education, they also realized that many other audiences could be well served by the AIE image-base. To address the needs of these users, such as K-12 education, AIE would offer additional specialized tools that help interpret and present AIE images to a variety of audiences. Such tools may range from forms containing pre-selected sets of images suitable for specific audiences, to simplified query engines that are easy to use. For academic use, AIE may offer online tools for arranging images to form lectures, or ways to keep and name pointers to images that are being kept for specific purposes, such as research. Faculty members may wish to attach their personal curricula to those already within the concordance.

One of the greatest challenges to a project such as this is how to continue to offer free images, while raising enough funds to keep the program self-sufficient. Many suggestions were offered for producing income while still offering free downloads. These included

Also, vendors of teaching and research images may wish to integrate their catalogs with the AIE databases, and agreements with such vendors can include a fee or percentage of sales that would generate income for the project. For-profit users can be required to pay fees to join and to publish images from the AIE stock. Publishers and service providers may find the AIE pages congenial to advertising aimed at the academic community. Linking to Amazon.com would provide a commission on sales. Extra service components, such as bibliographies and access to certain user contributions can also be fee-based. As a program of a not-for-profit organization, AIE can expect to attract tax-deductible monetary donations and donations in kind.

The group agreed that a database with a concordance interface was the minimal acceptable implementation needed to demonstrate the feasibility of the AIE project. It was decided that the concordance prototype should aim to cover the entire scope of the standard two-term art history survey curriculum (prehistoric to modern art), with the understanding that it may be difficult or impossible to obtain rights to use images of works still under copyright. The full concordance will cite approximately 2,500 works, including those for which AIE group members have no images. The group thought that the first impression of the Image Exchange should be enduring. To ensure that the first implementation of the prototype was memorable and representative of the overall curriculum, it was decided that it should contain about half of the images used in the surveys. These images would come from all areas of the survey (with the exception of modern art) and would be accompanied at least by minimal cataloging data. The stated goal was to release the prototype in a testbed implementation on or about September 1999.

Allan Kohl offered the use of his concordance list for building the concordance prototype. He estimated it would take one month to complete the list, which is limited to what he defines as consensus key monuments (those works used by more than one of the major survey textbooks). The group agreed that the consensus core-2,500 objects from the concordance-should be cataloged in advance before it is linked to images and to the concordance data. This procedure might involve negotiating with expert subject catalogers. Some members of the group believed that the concordance should index the exact contents of each selected textbook and should not attempt to merge data or eliminate data not identified as consensus monuments, but that view did not prevail.

Objections were raised to the practice of image substitution (using one object to stand for its functional equivalent when an image of the exact monument used in the books is not available). The group agreed, however, that this practice was pedagogically defensible and consistent with the aims of the concordance database. The AIE may also find that it has at its disposal more than one view of any target object and may have to decide whether to limit itself to a single image or to use several. Issues of this nature will be decided by a review committee of art historians, since there is no way to predetermine programmatically whether the aims of the concordance will best be served by including several views or a single one.

It is the group's intention ultimately to offer as many views of well-known objects as possible, in keeping with the AIE mission, because multiple views facilitate diverse ways of interpreting objects. For the purpose of the concordance, care must be taken that the images selected at least support the ideas of the textbook authors. The concordance committee was charged with selecting the appropriate view or views for the concordance and with engaging a review panel of prominent art historians to help determine whether the images selected have valid art historical utility.

In an effort to release image donors from having to adhere to the same standards expected of AIE catalogers, the group approved the outline of a simple Web submission form that should be suitable for submitting several images at a time (perhaps up to 25). For large, collection-sized donations of images, AIE would negotiate arrangements directly with donors to make the process as simple and as professional as possible. To acquire digital versions of large collections, special funding may have to be solicited. Owners of scanned collections should be given copies of the scans and data and should have unencumbered access to their collections at the AIE site. The group agreed that an efficient and accurate system with which to track transactions and match catalog data to images would be essential. Bob Thibadeau has access to a scanner that scans slides and slide labels surfaces together, thereby linking textual descriptions to scanned transparencies.

The group agreed that the minimum data needed to describe a submitted object would include

It was agreed that it would not be necessary to include a working submission form in the prototype; a dummy model would suffice. A formal contract or agreement and copyright warranty should be part of the submission form. CMU agreed to model the prototype database to an XML-based entry form.

The straw man system Robert presented would provide scholars the opportunity to submit more complexly elaborated data that would enhance the quality and utility of the database. This feature was not discussed, but access to such records was cited as a potential benefit of membership.

No decision was made to license use of specialized thesauri such as ULAN and the AAT. No effort is being made at this time to provide structured subject access.

The procedures available to users who want to take or receive images will probably be tied to options crucial to the success of the business plan. It has been agreed that casual users may take any image they need directly from the screen. Only two resolutions-thumbnail and screen-size (480 x 640)-will be available in this manner. All other resolutions, including projectable images and perhaps publishable images, will be available through direct download or written to CD-ROM. Income-producing activities may include making the right of access to the higher resolution images a privilege of membership. Downloaded images may be linked to data files, whose format will be selected by the user.

Participants also discussed standards for accepting and delivering digital images. No consensus in this area emerged. The group agreed to assume that the primary use of images would be for classroom projection, which requires large files. Because high-resolution digital projection is an emerging technology, the practical high-resolution limit has not yet been determined. Ideally images should be stored in the highest resolution feasible, but for reasons of efficiency and for purposes of establishing the corpus of images that constitute the concordance, it was decided to accept the highest resolution currently available, while establishing standards for new scans.

Susan encouraged the group to limit submissions to three formats: (1) slides or negatives (to be digitized by the AIE staff), (2) PhotoCD (from which only the 18-MB files would be taken), and (3) raw TIFF scans (unprocessed, 18 MB). These three formats would generate the highest level masters for multipurposing as needed and should be useful for at least several years into the future. The group agreed it would be preferable to obtain large files. However, to generate the necessary critical mass of images, the group acknowledged that it may be necessary to relax this requirement temporarily by accepting lower resolution scans as place-holders until better ones can be obtained.

It was the consensus of the group that the AIE could not rely on a pool of volunteer slide curators to be responsible for cataloging. The Vision Project, sponsored by Visual Resources Association (VRA) and the Research Libraries Group showed that in the absence of cataloging rules, using a dispersed group of catalogers resulted in confusing and inconsistent results. Don stated that funding for processing staff must be built into the project's business plan. The group agreed that a part-time processor should be hired to process images and collect cataloging information. Max volunteered workspace at Yale for the part-time cataloger/processor and offered to identify funding for image scanning.

The mechanism by which the AIE is able to publish its images on the Web depends upon use of the public domain and upon the good will of faculty photographers who license to the AIE their photographs of public domain objects. Recent case law (Bridgeman v. Corel) suggests that certain reproductive images of works in the public domain may not be copyrightable and thus may be copied and republished with impunity. This was also the opinion of the intellectual property attorney at the meeting, Michael Shamos. However the judicial history on this point is not yet clear, so that use of reproductive images that carry a claim of copyright (defensible or not) may not yet be in the best interest of the AIE. After a discussion about the lack of copyright protection for any non-unique (reproductive) photographs of public domain objects (in light of the Bridgeman case), Robert, Don, Max, and Katie agreed to develop a plan of action to ensure that the AIE has a viable policy regarding the submission of such reproductive photographs.

The group felt that for the purpose of the establishing the prototype, the AIE would not be able to settle all issues surrounding the ownership and use of intellectual property. Katie urged using a contributor contract. Chris offered the contract used by the Academic Press Image Directory. It is clear that the AIE needs the services of an intellectual property attorney.

During discussions a variety of personal agendas emerged. Individual group members expressed the desire

The group did not resolve a number of questions about concordance images, including

The group adopted an action plan, a timetable, and an organizational structure for carrying the project forward during 1999. An interim governing board and six committees were formed and given assignments, leading up to a testbed prototype implementation on the Web by about September 1999.

(a) For missing images, Robert and Katie will work to identify sources of images and donors. (b) The Review Committee (appointed by Charles and Katie) will decide whether the images are acceptable for the purpose of teaching survey courses.

End of June 1999: Complete concordance lists and data model (concordance and database fields only).

Don asked the participants (see earlier list of participants) at the meeting to serve as an interim Governing Board. He charged the group with the task of eventually replacing itself by creating a permanent institution for governance.

A Concordance Committee consisting of Allan, Kathy, Jeff, Paula, Micheline, and Robert will be responsible for

A Data Model Committee consisting of Susan, Chris, Micheline, and Robert will be responsible for the following design and implementation tasks:

An Evaluation Committee consisting of Charles Rhyne and Katie Hollander will

The Review Committee will consist of select art historians not associated with the AIE project and its job will be to decide whether the selected images are acceptable for the purpose of teaching the survey course ("the stamp of approval").

An Advisory Committee consisting of Max, Jeff, and Katie ex officio is charged with making decisions about advertisers and corporate sponsors on behalf of the AIE group.

An Intellectual Property Committee consisting of Robert, Don, Max, and Katie will develop a plan of action to ensure that the AIE has a viable policy regarding the submission of reproductive photographs and has appropriate contractual arrangements for contributors of photographs. Along with legal agreements for donors of photographs, guidelines are needed to determine the public domain status of other images and photographs. For these tasks, the advice of counsel will be required.

Three other areas were identified: technical systems, legal issues and marketing but committee members were not assigned at the meeting.

A subgroup of the Concordance Committee-Allan, Kathy, Paula, and Jeff- was assigned the task of gathering images for the concordance. Robert Baron was asked to keep track of the progress of assembling concordance images. A quick inventory of the images available within the group was taken: Allan Kohl had 25 percent of the images for Ancient to Medieval periods (all available without royalty). He had 50 percent of images for the Medieval period (mainly from reproductions, though there might be copyright issues with these). He had 10 percent from the Renaissance to Modern periods. Jeff Cohen and Paula Behrens (through SAH) have images in 640 x 480dpi resolution of architecture up to the Renaissance. They were willing to create larger files using the original source materials. If additional images were needed for AIE, they offered to solicit images from other SAH contributors. The SAH Image Exchange concordance includes three textbooks.

Kathleen Cohen agreed to provide her digital images for the first half of the survey. She was willing to offer images at the 640 x 480dpi level. In addition to developing her own project, Kathy has worked with a consortium of visual resources curators from the California State University, in their efforts to assemble an image database. Some of these California materials may be made available to the AIE. The California group has completed the first half of the art history survey and is maintaining a concordance grid to keep track of their progress.

Kathy and Allan agreed to inventory holdings and to consolidate their list of images in order to cover gaps in the first half of the survey. Jeff, Micheline, and Paula will finish their architecture concordance, currently completed up to the Renaissance. To expand the AIE concordance holdings, potential image donors will be contacted individually after the AIE group has analyzed images supplied by members of the group. The group agreed it could easily identify the locations of special collections without a public solicitation. Katie and Robert will work to identify potential image donors. Katie offered to approach several authors of survey texts and to request use of images for which they own copyright. In addition Katie thought that some members of the CAA board might be willing to provide some images. She agreed to solicit images from the board, either when they meet in July or via the CAA board listserv.

The decision was made to provide a catalog record for each image in the concordance in advance. These records would serve as placeholders and permit an easy inventory of remaining gaps. Susan was given the cataloging task and will be responsible for creating a first draft of the cataloging data fields based on her Filemaker Pro slide cataloging system. Upon review by the Data Model Committee, other fields may be added to Susan's sample form. Other areas-rights and permissions, membership categories and rules, order transactions, and information submission forms, and others- also need to be developed. Susan's field list must be parsed to replicate the entity relationship diagram.

The concordance system will be created by linking the concordance database, the object description database, the images, and several other files. Susan will populate the object list and provide requisite image scans. Kathy and Allan will provide images and create the concordance file. Robert will create file and field specifications in accordance with the entity relationship diagram and will describe the few requisite application tools needed. The Data Committee, with the help of other members, should approve the field list. The Review Committee will authorize the use of submitted images. Carnegie-Mellon programming support will use these elements to build a relational database, provide the XML code, and mount the application on Web servers under a domain name still to be determined.

Although the selection of standards and techniques to control image quality could not be decided at this meeting, it was acknowledged to be crucial to the project's eventual acceptance and success. Instead of instituting technical standards, it was decided to judge each image and its derivatives on the dual bases of appropriateness and quality. To administer this vetting process, the group appointed an Evaluation Committee that will be responsible for selecting an unaffiliated group of art historians (the Review Committee) to judge image quality. For the purposes of the prototype, the evaluation process will not be fully developed. The effectiveness of this technique will be evaluated. To save processing time, only full scans will be viewed. The committee should expect to meet to compare groups of images and to select those deemed appropriate for use in the concordance. The SAH group estimates it takes about four hours to review about 250 slides. Slide donors should be asked to stamp their name on each item submitted and care must be taken to show that the AIE project takes responsible care of materials submitted. Tentatively, July was selected as the time frame for the concordance image review.

Planning Grant. With regard to the strategic, legal, and practical issues, it was decided that Katie, Max, and Don would search for funds to aid in the initial stages of development. Specifically, monies will be required in order to

At the June 15 meeting at the CAA offices, the planning grant requirements were established in greater detail. The work flowchart of activities to be supported by the planning grant is available at http://www.diglib.org/aieflowchart.gif .

Towards a Business Plan. Katie will develop plans for advertising and corporate sponsorship for consideration by the Advisory Committee (Max and Jeff) and will prepare a list of sponsors and advertisers for the committee's review. The Advisory Committee was charged with making decisions about advertisers and corporate sponsors on behalf of the AIE. Katie will pursue all sources of funding (foundations, corporate) at the same time, including the ideas for generating revenue: