Membership Invitation

Note: AMICO is no longer accepting new members. These pages are maintained for historical reasons.

Dear Director,

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) was formed in October 1997and is an independent non-profit organization, with a 501 (c) 3 designation from the IRS. Membership in AMICO is open to any non-profit organization, worldwide, with a collection of art. We now have over 39 members in the United States and Canada, and are speaking with a number of institutions in other countries about joining as well.

AMICO's mission is to enable educational use of museum multimedia. Together, AMICO Members are building a joint digital library documenting their collections, and making this resource, known as The AMICO Library?, available to a range of educational communities.

We would like to invite you to become a member of AMICO. Since AMICO draws its strength from the diversity and number of its members, we are encouraging broad participation from a diverse cross-section of institutions.

As a member of AMICO your institution will receive complimentary access to The AMICO Library, as presented by all our distributors, for use by staff of and visitors to your museum. In addition to Research Libraries Group, AMICO has partnered with other organizations, including Cartography Associates, H.W. Wilson, the Scottish Cultural Resources Network (SCRAN), and VTLS to ensure the widest possible distribution of The AMICO Library. As well as research organizations, our distributors have colleges, primary and secondary schools, museums, galleries and public libraries among their user base.

The AMICO Library launched in 1999 with images and documentation of over 50,000 works of art. The 2002 edition of The AMICO Library contains almost 100,000 works. Today The AMICO Library is available to more than 3 million students at over 300 colleges and universities, schools and public libraries around the world.

We are also offering The AMICO Library to a group of American K-12 school teachers, in a Testbed project, in order to investigate specific needs and uses of The AMICO Library in primary and secondary schools. AMICO Members see participation in the Consortium as a great way for your institution to expand their reach and serve their educational mission.

When your museum becomes an AMICO Member you plug into an entire network of like-minded colleagues who are leading the way in collections management and digitization. AMICO is an innovative collaboration, not seen before in museums,that shares, shapes, and standardizes information regarding cultural collections. AMICO Members benefit in a two-fold manner:

1. Disseminating their collections to a wide audience for educational purposes and
   
2. Learning from their fellow Members, knowing your digital documentation will meet shared standards.

Two categories of membership have been established: Full and Associate.

• Full Membership is available to organizations willing to contribute digital documentation of works during their initial year of membership. The suggested submission is 500 works per year, but AMICO will help you ramp up to that requirement over time if your technical resources do not allow your organization to submit at that level immediately. Conversely, once technical expertise has grown, we hope that Members will contribute as many works as they are able, so The AMICO Library will become as robust and comprehensive as possible. These works must have rights clearance for educational uses and be documented according to AMICO's technical specifications. The expertise of AMICO's staff is available to assist you with this task.
• Associate Membership is available for those who do not wish to contribute works at the moment, but who wish to take advantage of access to The AMICO Library and of the ability to work with AMICO committees and staff to prepare for full participation in the future.

Your membership application is complete when you have returned a Membership Application, a signed Membership Agreement, and a signed AMICO Library Museum Agreement to the AMICO Membership, Robarts Library, 7th Floor
University of Toronto, 130 St.George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1A5 Canada

If you have any questions about AMICO Membership, please feel free to contact me, or any of the others listed below:

Elizabeth Broun
Chairman of the Board, AMICO
Director, Smithsonian Museum of American Art
Phone: (202) 275 1515, Email: management @amico.org

Maxwell L. Anderson, Vice-Chairman and Treasurer
Director, Whitney Museum of American Art
Phone: (212) 570-3635, Email: management @amico.org

Jennifer Trant
Executive Director, AMICO
Phone: (416) 946-8692, Email: jtrant @amico.org

AMICO offers an exciting way for museums to collaborate in fulfilling our educational missions. The success of AMICO will depend upon its members. I hope that you will join us in building a large and rich library of art documentation -- one that will make museums a critical piece in the international digital educational landscape.

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Broun
Chairman of the Board
Art Museum Image Consortium