AMICO Press Release

July 13, 2000
AMICO Headquarters; Pittsburgh, PA

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) and Antenna Audio, Inc. have reached an agreement to link sound files created by Antenna Audio to corresponding works in the AMICO Library. Antenna Audio, the leading creator s of audio exhibition tours for museums, historic sites, and other visitor attractions around the world, will make sound files available for works held by AMICO Member museums. AMICO Members may link these digital sounds to the digital documentation about the work that they have contributed to the AMICO Library, enhancing its content and leveraging the investments museums and Antenna Audio made in creating audio tours for exhibitions and collections. Antenna Audio sound clips will be acknowledged in the online display of the AMICO Library.

This agreement allows AMICO to further its mission to deliver museum multimedia to educational institutions for academic use, provides Members a streamlined way to include quality audio content in their AMICO submissions, and helps to highlight Antenna Audio as a leading creator of interpretive tours and audio assets. "Working with Antenna Audio is really a win-win -- students and teachers get excellent commentaries on works in the AMICO Library and Members and Antenna Audio gain additional distribution of their audio tours in a protected, educational use-only environment," notes AMICO Executive Director, Jennifer Trant. Observes Harriet Moss, President and CEO of Antenna Audio, "the collaborative aspects of AMICO are very important to Antenna Audio, as well as its focus on educational use. We're pleased to be working with AMICO in helping museums utilize digital technologies to expand their interpretive reach."

The world's leader and innovator in the field of museum interpretation through audio tools and resources, Antenna Audio is committed to working with museums to enhance the experience of special exhibitions and permanent collections for a wide range of visitors. Its beginnings as a non-profit theater company in 1980 have provided Antenna with the ability to create new ways of using audio guides to educate and engage museum audiences. More than 40,000,000 people throughout the world have experienced audio programs developed by Antenna at museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery, London.

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 2000-2001 edition of the AMICO Library documents over 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. Over 700,000 students on more than 110 campuses in North America currently have full, 24-hour access to high-quality museum multimedia."

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 32 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 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 McMichael Canadian Art Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art Minneapolis Institute of Arts MontrZ˙al Museum of Fine Arts MusZ˙e d'art contemporain de MontrZ˙al Museum of the Americas Foundation Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Gallery of Canada 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 Whitney Museum of American Art

AMICO Jennifer Trant Executive Director Art Museum Image Consortium 2008 Murray Avenue, Suite D Pittsburgh, PA 15217 Phone (412) 422 8533 Fax (412) 422 8594 Email: jtrant@amico.org http://www.amico.org

Antenna Audio Sally Vandershaf Marketing Manager Antenna Audio, Inc. PO Box 176 Sausalito, CA 94966 Phone (415) 332 4862 x128 Fax (415) 332 4870 Email: svandershaf@antenna-audio.com http://www.antenna-audio.com