AMICO Press Release

November 3, 2000
AMICO Headquarters; Pittsburgh, PA

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the United Kingdom has agreed to make the AMICO Library available for subscription by all universities in the United Kingdom at a subsidized rate. This will allow all UK Universities access to the AMICO Library for the next three years at a highly reduced cost. The JISC promotes the innovative application and use of information systems and information technology in higher and further education in the UK. Its central role ensures that the uptake of new technologies and methods is cost-effective, comprehensive, and well-focused. "Having the AMICO Library available to over 1.43 million students in the United Kingdom is certainly thrilling for AMICO," states Jennifer Trant, Executive Director of AMICO. "The fact that these students will have access to digital images and multimedia content from North American museums emphasizes the power of online networks to break down the barriers to information access. The local has gone global." Ms. Trant goes on to note, "Our hope is that this relationship with the JISC will begin AMICO's internationalization. We look forward to opening AMICO up into a worldwide collaboration, with new member museums in the UK and beyond, and subscribers around the world. This will truly meet our Members' goal of enabling educational use of museum multimedia."

The AMICO Library will be provided as one of the new online resources for the JISC Distributed Image Service, part of the JISC strategy for adding value to the UK's learning, teaching and research resources, the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). The DNER is a managed environment for accessing quality-assured information resources on the Internet which are available from many sources. These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections. "The AMICO Library, with its image-based focus and many added-value contextual and multimedia attributes, is a welcome addition to the our offerings, " notes Catherine Grout, Collections Manager for Multimedia. "Providing students in British universities with an online repository of museum multimedia that is otherwise geographically inaccessible is an objective entirely in line with building the DNER." More information is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner .

The JISC receives its funding from the higher and further education funding councils in the UK. It works in partnership with the Research Councils. More information about the JISC, its services and programmes can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/. JISC Assist provides a first point of contact for help and guidance on issues relating to the JISC and the use of information systems and information technology. For further information and advice, contact JISC Assist by email at assist@jisc.ac.uk. Or telephone JISC Assist on +44 (0) 117 954 6850.

The AMICO Library makes multimedia documentation of artworks from the collections of leading museums available to universities, colleges, schools, and public libraries. The 2000-2001 edition of the AMICO Library documents approximately 65,000 different works of art, from prehistoric goddess figures to contemporary installations. More than simply an image database, works in the AMICO Library are fully documented and may also include curatorial text about the artwork, detailed provenance information, multiple views of the work itself, and other related multimedia. As Jennifer Trant, AMICO Executive Director, notes, "subscribers find the AMICO Library of interest because it combines the immediacy and accessibility of the Web with the persistence and academic weight of traditional library reference sources."

The AMICO Library is accessible over secure networks to institutional subscribers, including universities, colleges, libraries, schools, and museums. Designated users can include faculty, students, teachers, staff, and researchers. UK educational institutions are eligible for the special pricing offer from the JISC and may find out more details on pricing and how to subscribe on the JISC web site at:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/amico.html.

There you will also find information about a 30-day free trial offer to preview the AMICO Library. Access to the AMICO Library will be through the Research Libraries Group's Eureka service in the first subscription year.

The AMICO Library is a product of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), an independent non-profit corporation, with 501 (c) 3 designation from the IRS. The Consortium is today made up of over 30 major museums in the United States and Canada. It's an innovative collaboration - not seen before in museums - that shares, shapes, and standardizes digital information regarding museum collections and enables its educational use. Membership is open to any institution with a collection of art.

Current AMICO Members

Albright-Knox Art Gallery Art Gallery of Ontario Art Institute of Chicago Asia Society Gallery Center for Creative Photography Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Cleveland Museum of Art Dallas Museum of Art Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College Denver Art Museum Detroit Institute of Arts Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco The Frick Collection and Art Reference Library George Eastman House J. Paul Getty Museum

The Library of Congress Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Minneapolis Institute of Arts Montréal Museum of Fine Arts Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Gallery of Canada Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Philadelphia Museum of Art San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Jose Museum of Art Smithsonian American Art Museum Walker Art Center The Walters Art Museum Whitney Museum of American Art

For further information