AMICO Press Release

February 11, 2000
AMICO Headquarters; Pittsburgh, PA

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is pleased to welcome the Dallas Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Museum of the Americas Foundation to our growing Consortium. These three new Members further increase the depth and variety of the AMICO Library, enhance its usefulness as an educational tool, and add strength to the institutional knowledge sharing of the Consortium. "With AMICO membership now over thirty institutions we are hitting our stride as an organization and as a tool for humanities studies," states AMICO Executive Director, Jennifer Trant. "Dallas and Denver bring significant collections and the MOA Foundation adds a new dimension to the AMICO Library reaching into the Caribbean, Mexico, and Latin America," Ms. Trant adds.

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), located in Dallas, Texas, houses an impressive encyclopedic collection of nearly 25,000 objects - from the arts of Africa, ancient America, Asia, and the Pacific, to European and American decorative arts and paintings and sculpture by old master, impressionist, modern, and contemporary artists. Additionally, the DMA has been a leader in providing public access to its collection records via the GTE Collections Information Center. As DMA Director John R. Lane notes, "Joining AMICO will be a great way to provide that information more widely, as well as enhance the content of the Center for our visitors through AMICO Library access."

Colorado's Denver Art Museum (DAM) has the largest and most comprehensive collection of world art between Kansas City and the West Coast, with over 40,000 works of art. The varied holdings include a particular strength in the Native Arts with more than 17,000 objects from the indigenous peoples of North America, a collecting commitment to the area of architecture, design, and graphics, and many standards that capture the spirit of the American West. DAM also is a rich repository of Asian art, locally and world-renowned Modern and contemporary works, over 5,000 objects from the pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial periods, and fine selections of European and American masters. Lewis Sharp, DAM's Director, hopes this collaboration with AMICO will "broaden exposure of DAM's collection to new users and help us further our educational mission."

The Washington, DC-based Museum of the Americas Foundation was established in 1998 through the shared work of the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Smithsonian Institution with the ambitious mission to create an inclusive museum devoted to the art and culture of the Western Hemisphere. The Foundation will work closely with the Smithsonian Institution as well as museums throughout North America, the Caribbean, and South and Central America to bring public attention to the existing, rich collections that chronicle cultural achievement in the Western Hemisphere. "The MOA is scheduled to open in 2007, but with our online presence and our contributions to AMICO, we have a great opportunity to build awareness and provide valuable resources virtually to our potential audiences," observes Christopher C. Addison, President of the Foundation.

The AMICO Library, officially launched July 1st, 1999, has made multimedia documentation of artworks from the collections of leading museums across North America available to universities, colleges, schools, and public libraries. The 1999-2000 edition of the AMICO Library documents over 50,000 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. Educational institutions may subscribe to the AMICO Library by contacting one of its distributors. These include the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK). A subscription to the AMICO Library provides a one-year license to use works from the compiled AMICO Library for a broad range of educational purposes. Interested subscribers may preview a Thumbnail Catalog of the AMICO Library and get further information at http://www.amico.org.

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 31 major museums. 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.

Current List of AMICO Members