Image Matters: A Binocular View (Yale + Luna Imaging) of the Digital Marketplace
We wish to devote this brief article to making the following argument: The time is ripe for universities and academic libraries to invest in the infrastructure required for managing digital image collections and integrating them into the fabric of teaching and learning. Institutional situations vary, of course, and so in framing our argument as one "view" of the digital marketplace,we wish to acknowledge its contingent nature; and in further describing this"view" as "binocular," we similarly recognize that it is shaped by our own experiences at Yale University, working closely with colleagues at Luna Imaging,Inc.[1].
The case for making a judicious investment in the development and deployment of digital image libraries is based on the following considerations. We are now seeing:
a widespread and growing institutional readiness to use digital images;
a maturing marketplace for digital images;
feature-rich, scaleable, widely-used software for the management and use of digital images.
We will discuss each of these topics, focusing upon our own experience at Yale, upon our collaboration with Luna Imaging, and upon our experience working with the several institutional participants in the Luna Users Group[2].
Institutional Readiness
Faculty and students across the humanities increasingly:
need networked, campus-wide, 24 x 7 access to image collections (an image OPAC);
have access to wired classrooms, with "early implementers" increasingly eager to try teaching digitally;
expect images to be part of the Web-based information apparatus of courses in the humanities, alongside syllabi, reserve readings, chat groups, etc;
are expected to have digital skills and imaging literacy in their job placement portfolio.
Visual Resources (VR) collections (both those situated within libraries and those within academic departments) are:
under increasing pressure from faculty and students and many VR professionals are themselves eager to provide networked access to digital image collections as part of their core mission to support teaching;
increasingly committed to acting in concert to achieve this goal by (for example) developing data standards and application guidelines for the description of digital images, sharing cataloging data and images, fostering the development of high-quality digital image libraries in support of teaching and scholarship; and
championing educational fair use in the public policy arena.
Academic libraries, finally, are, as readers of this publication scarcely need reminding, now routinely:
operating with an acquisitions model that stresses access over "ownership";
subscribing via license to hundreds of textual and numeric resources in digital form (nearly 10 percent of many acquisitions budgets); and
working with faculty and students to manage and use the information they derive from library information resources ("knowledge management").
Academic libraries are well placed to help VR professionals respond to the needs of faculty and students by adding digital image collections to the growing suite of electronic information resources for which they provide campus-wide access and instructional support.
This institutional readiness to migrate to digital, while not ubiquitous within or across institutions, is widespread and will grow exponentially over the next few years. Darwin is at work here and we do nobody any favors by being in denial about that fact. Those of us charged with building sustainable information infrastructures and tools and providing instruction in their use,must respond to the digital moment even if the need to do so is not universally acknowledged, nor the value of doing so immediately evident to all the constituencies we serve.
The Maturing Digital Image Marketplace
Simultaneously with the spread of institutional readiness to engage with imaging technologies, the marketplace for digital images is also ripening fast,with three basic models emerging:
- 1.
Commercial image services of secondary interest to scholars and teachers. Examples: the Asssociated Press Photo Archive, Corbis, Getty Images[3].
- 2.
Consortial image services shaped primarily by the institutional imperatives and interests of content suppliers rather than the needs of scholars and teachers. Examples: AMICO, the Research Libraries Group's nascent Cultural Materials Initiative[4].
- 3.
User-driven imaging initiatives that respond by design to the needs of teachers and students in colleges and universities. Examples: Art Images for College Teaching, the Society of Architectural Historians Image Exchange, the Digital Library Federation's Academic Image Cooperative, Imaging America,ArtSTOR[5].
The development of "user-driven" digital libraries promises to produce the critical mass of materials relevant to teaching that will justify an investment in the infrastructure required to integrate digital images into teaching and learning. We will focus therefore on the development of a few particularly promising imaging initiatives that aspire to be exemplary and scaleable.
The Academic Image Cooperative (AIC), jointly sponsored by the Digital Library Federation and the College Art Association, has modeled in some detail the development of a sustainable digital image library that will support widespread art history curricular needs, evolving in the process a digital collection designed to support one of the most widespread courses in the humanities, the typical art history survey.
Imaging America, with the support of the American Studies Association, seeks to develop a digital image library in support of the study of American art,architecture, material and visual culture. It takes as its starting point the essential Carnegie Study of the Arts of the United States, a slide collection developed in the 1960s under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation and coordinated by the University of Georgia, and central to instruction in American art history for the past 40 years. Imaging America will enrich this 4,500-image"canon" by attending closely to current teaching strategies in American studies.
ArtSTOR is a new initiative just being launched by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It takes its name from the Foundation's JSTOR initiative, and indeed has its origins in the technical and legal challenges encountered in planning an Art History component for JSTOR. Like JSTOR, ArtSTOR aims to leverage existing library collections to create a digital library that, in turn, will reduce the costly redundancy so characteristic of visual resources operations and services.
ArtSTOR may be built simultaneously on several tracks, all based on informed assumptions about scholarly and teaching needs:
an Image Gallery consisting of a suite of discrete teaching collections designed around widespread curricula on the AIC/Imaging America model and derived from individuals and institutions;
broad research collections derived from scholarly art history photo archives; and
deep scholarly collections of primary source materials of the kind already developed through Mellon's work with the MOMA design collection and the Mellon International Dun Huang Archive.
The ArtSTOR teaching collections may begin to appear first, while larger research collections are being created on parallel tracks. These teaching collections are likely to include:
c. 4,000 images, based on excellent original and "copystand"(reproductive) photography, covering the standard art history survey and c. 90 percent of an "overlap concordance" of the illustrations in the ten standard survey texts;
perhaps 15,000-20,000 images covering the history of American art and architecture, material and visual culture, incorporating the 4,500-image Carnegie Arts of the US collection, but textured by a larger selection of new images identified in connection with the publication of a new survey of the arts in America;
several thousand images supporting an Asian art survey based on a private photo archive;
similar discrete collections of images supporting a range of standard art history curricula (Islamic art, Mesoamerican art, etc.).
ArtSTOR will, as a matter of policy, freely employ high-quality copystand photography (reproductive photography derived from published books and journals)where that is the only available source of digital images that meet the needs of teachers and scholars. It will do so within the "safe haven" provided by a licensing framework embracing content providers, system administrators, and subscribers and expressly devoted to education and scholarship.
Software for the Management and use of Digital Images: A Case Study involving Yale University and Luna Imaging's Insight Software
Institutional readiness and a ripening digital marketplace are powerful arguments for making a significant institutional investment in imaging infrastructure. But absent appropriate (robust, feature-rich, scaleable) tools for the management, distribution, and use of digital images, such an investment would be premature. Several colleges, universities, and museums have decided independently to work with Luna Imaging's "Insight" software to integrate digital images into the fabric of teaching, learning, and scholarship. We will conclude this brief article by outlining the path by which we at Yale reached this decision, and will demonstrate the preliminary results, which we believe to be of general interest and value[6].
Five years ago, the Yale Library conducted its first experiment in image-based Web support for an art history class, selecting Professor Vincent Scully's survey of Western art history from antiquity to the Renaissance, which routinely enrolls c. 500 undergraduates every fall semester (see Figure 1). This early Web site was composed in raw html, since Web editing software barely existed in 1996. Subsequently, we "streamlined" this kind of Web support by employing Web editors, but the results remained problematic. For one thing,such static Web sites are virtual Web boutiques which, while enormously popular with faculty and students, are expensive and not scalable with limited resources. We needed an image database and (ideally) the ability to generate course image reserves from that database more or less on the fly. Moreover, even our "streamlined" process entailed the commitment of no fewer than 60 hours of Web work per week and the use of five discrete software tools: Photoshop (for image processing); Filemaker Pro (for a cataloging tool); ImageAXS (for course Web site creation); HTML Editor (for Web site design and editing); Power Point(for classroom presentations).
Figure 1.Front screen for Vincent Scully's Western Art History Survey: Prehistory to Renaissance
In the fall of 1998, we conducted a needs assessment and concluded that we needed an integrated system that would serve as an "image OPAC," enable faculty-friendly classroom presentations, and facilitate and streamline the creation of image study groups. At the same time, from an organizational perspective we sought a single, campus-wide management and presentation system for images. The stakeholders in this search included faculty and students in the history of art and related disciplines that depend fundamentally on the use of visual resources; the Arts Library's Visual Resources Collection; the Beinecke Rare Book Library and other library units with distinctive special collections(archives and manuscripts, maps, etc.); the Library Systems Office; the University's Information Technology Services department; and the Yale museums,including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Center for British Art, and the Peabody Museum, all of which hoped to make their growing digital image collections easily accessible to scholars, teachers, and students. Our implementation goals included a particular commitment to develop and study the classroom use of digital images, driven by faculty teaching needs, and a tandem commitment to deliver a working system in one calendar year from initial implementation. Finally, we were especially committed to ensuring that our eventual image management system would be an integral part of the Yale Library electronic resources gateway, the "Research Workstation"[7].
A campus-wide Digital Imaging Infrastructure task force, with participation from all the stakeholders listed above, conducted an "environmental scan" of pertinent software developers and ultimately recommended a collaboration with Luna Imaging, Inc. Luna's Insight software offered a range of features key to our aspirations:
an intuitive and elegant user interface;
robust Web access (browser version);
ability to save and broadcast image groups (image reserves) (see Figure 2);and
an HTML export feature (to create static pages for course-based Web sites).
Figure 2Image reserves in Luna Insight
Luna was also extremely receptive to our proposal that they develop a classroom presentation tool responding to the expressed needs of instructors,permitting them to transfer their traditional pedagogy to the digital arena and,as appropriate, to explore new ways of teaching[8].
We have been especially struck by the range of interests that our users bring to the digital image library and to the use of the Insight software in particular. These interests include: the wish to try teaching digitally (and to get out of the slide carousel business); to create ad hoc image reserves for student study, based on classroom presentations; to simply explore. But in setting about building a digital image library, we decided early on to build an image collection based on teaching needs, encouraging faculty use in the classroom and for student image study.
With this came a commitment to providing instruction to faculty and students in the use of the Luna Insight software, securing routine feedback from users,and working with Luna to enhance the already impressive software. After some initial experimentation, we have concluded that there is room for a range of instructional modes and settings, including: group workshops, tutorials during class "sections" led by teaching assistants; brief tutorials during lectures,individual faculty and student interactions, a range of demonstrations, a usage guide. The existing online Insight help files are excellent and widely used by our students and faculty.
We have tried each semester to survey our users and this spring we were able to collect the largest set of results yet. Almost 400 student surveys were returned and we found out many valuable things both about the software and our implementation. Most fascinating is that students felt the software greatly improved study and comprehension. Students in non-art history classes, such as American Studies, felt that the images were a valuable enhancement to the class. For this set of students image study and memorization were not mandatory, so their comments were often more instructive than those of students who needed the images for identification on tests.
Challenges remain. Foremost among them are the need to accommodate unpredicted, last-minute requests for new images, the need to enable the classroom use of "private images" which a faculty member wishes to share in this environment only and which are not part of a "public" collection of images, the frequent lack of adequate (or indeed any!) metadata and source information,authentication mechanisms enabling remote use, and robust rights management solutions.
Among our fundamental conclusions from this experiment in digital image library development are:
Instructional support is essential to the successful integration of digital images into teaching and learning in the humanities. We found that students and especially faculty, were much more comfortable with and excited about the software once they had some level of instruction.
Partnerships with other departments/units outside the library can be invaluable organizationally and in terms of content development and technology transfer. We are lucky enough to have several partners both within and outside of the library system. We attribute the successes we have had this year to the support we have received from the Library Systems Office and the Information Technology Services.
Scale matters (it is essential to stay ahead of the user's needs). When we first introduced Insight to faculty we had 5,000 images in the database. We found it was very difficult to convince faculty to use the software when so few of the images they needed were actually within the database. A year later we have 15,000 (including licensed images from a growing range of sources). Faculty now are increasingly interested in using the database.
It is imperative to accommodate spontaneity. Last minute image requests are not only frequent, but in many ways essential to teaching.
Finally, it is imperative to accommodate different users and levels of use and to create an active collaboration between users and creators.
Notes
- 1.
Luna Imaging, Inc. (Culver City, Ca.): http://www.luna-imaging.com
- 2.
The LUG is an informal group of current and prospective Luna Imaging clients, and includes the following libraries, museums and other institutions:Berkeley, Cartography Associates, Cornell, Harvard, MoMA, MIT, NYPL, Smith,Stanford, UT Austin, Yale. The group meets semiannually at a member institution.
- 3.
AP Photo Archive: http://ap.accuweather.com/apphoto/index.htm;Corbis: http://www.corbis.com; Getty Images: http://www.gettyimages.com
- 4.
AMICO: http://www.amico.org; RLG Cultural Materials Initiative: http://www.rlg.org/culturalres/
- 5.
AICT: http://www.mcad.edu/AICT; SAH Image Exchange: http://www. sah.org/imagex.html; DLF Academic Image Cooperative: http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/aic.htm;Imaging America: http://www.library.yale.edu/art/about.html;ArtSTOR: http://www.mellon.org/ (see Recent Announcements)
- 6.
We assume there will be a robust competitive marketplace for image management software, much as there is for library management systems. We do not wish to suggest in any way that other institutions should make the same software selection Yale did, though as with library management systems, we are pleased that several peer institutions are working with the same vendor we selected.
- 7.
- 8.
The latest version of the Insight software (version 3.0, released in spring 2001) offers several essential enhancements, including: an entirely new database architecture that facilitates cross-collection searching, the encoding of complex object relationships, end user image annotation, bi-directional Web links, delivery of digital audio and video, multi-view images especially suited to the presentation of architecture, sculpture, manuscript and other objects in which part/whole relationships are fundamental.
Barbara Rockenbach (barbara.rockenbach@yale.edu) is the Instructional Services Librarian, Arts Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Max Marmor (max.marmor@yale.edu) is the Director, Arts Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
