AMICO Press Release

July 21, 1999
AMICO Headquarters; Pittsburgh, PA

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), a growing not-for-profit consortium currently made up of 27 museum members in North America, has reached a distribution agreement with the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK), a consortium of Ohio's college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Through this agreement students, professors, and staff at 17 public universities, 23 community/technical colleges, and 35 private colleges in the state of Ohio will have access to the AMICO Library through OhioLINK's Digital Media Center starting in the fall of 1999. "OhioLINK already has an established expertise in delivering library resources such as the AMICO Library, so the fit was really natural for us," commented AMICO Executive Director, Jennifer Trant. "With this Agreement the broad, diverse community of OhioLINK institutions have full access to the AMICO Library through a familiar portal. Our hope is that our relationship with OhioLINK will become a model for similar statewide distribution agreements," stated Ms. Trant.

The 1999 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. "The AMICO Library is a welcome addition to our digital resources collection because it will expand the Digital Media Center with a rich image and multimedia database focused on art objects," states Charly Bauer, Assistant Director of Library Systems - Digital Media. Additionally, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), an AMICO Member, looks forward to this agreement building bridges to Ohio professors and students. "With this agreement providing AMICO Library access to so many universities and colleges across Ohio it's akin to having a traveling exhibition of our permanent collection visiting each school for an entire year," observes Stephanie Stebich in the Director's Office of the CMA. She goes on to say, "We hope this added exposure to the museum's fine works will enhance users' knowledge and draw visitors in the museum itself."

AMICO envisions the Library functioning in innovative ways that traditional resources can not. For instance, students may curate online exhibitions using AMICO images, professors could give "on the fly" lectures searching the AMICO Library in real-time class settings, restricted-access course web sites could be created for review purposes with AMICO images incorporated in them, and much more. To investigate how the AMICO Library may be used in educational institutions AMICO has just completed a yearlong University Testbed with 16 universities across the United States and Canada. A summary of many Testbed projects may be found on the AMICO web site at the following address, http://www.amico.org/projects/u.mtg.99/u.results.html. "The AMICO Library should be quite useful to our member institutions and a great complement to the prodigious resources that our establishment already provides. We hope that educators and students from many disciplines will see the creative possibilities of the Library and infuse their educational efforts in a new way," said Charly Bauer.

The AMICO Library is accessible over secure networks on an institutional subscriber basis. Images of artworks from museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum are included in the AMICO Library. A recent agreement with the Artists Rights Society provides AMICO Library users unprecedented access to modern and contemporary works. Interested users may preview a Thumbnail Catalog of the AMICO Library and get further information at http://www.amico.org.

The Ohio Library and Information Network, OhioLINK, is a consortium of Ohio's college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Serving more than 500,000 students, faculty, and staff at 76 institutions, OhioLINK offers access to more than 31 million library items statewide. OhioLINK also provides access to 95 research databases, and many full-text resources. Through OhioLINK's Electronic Journal Center, users have access to more than 2400 electronic journal subscriptions and over one-million journal articles. OhioLINK also offers user-initiated online borrowing, the ability to electronically request items while searching the OhioLINK central catalog, and a delivery service among member institutions to speed the exchange of library items. To date, the OhioLINK central catalog contains more than 7 million master records from its 76 institutions, encompassing a spectrum of library material including law, medical, and special collections.

OhioLINK's Digital Media Center will provide access to images, audio, video, and other types of digital information in a variety of disciplines such as art and architecture, medicine, and geography. The Digital Media Center will serve as a publishing outlet for OhioLINK members to contribute digital resources from their own unique collections.

The AMICO Library is a product of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO). Founded in October 1997 as a program of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) Educational Foundation, Inc., AMICO was separately incorporated as an independent non-profit corporation in June of 1998, ending its direct connection with the AAMD. The Consortium is today made up of 27 major museums in North America and is open to interested institutions with a collection of art. Its innovative collaboration shares, shapes, and standardizes information regarding visual data collections and enables its educational use. A full list of members can be found at http://www.amico.org.

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