AMICO Mission Statement and Brief History

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

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is a non-profit corporation made up of museums with collections dedicated to provide educational access to and delivery of cultural heritage information by creating, maintaining and licensing a collective digital library of images and documentation of works in their collections.

AMICO Membership is open to institutions with collections of art. Join Us!

AMICO enables its members to do a number of things that they cannot do on their own, including:

• Creating a collective library of art from museums worldwide for educational uses
• Reaching the educational community in a coordinated and cost effective way
• Enabling its members to leverage influence with vendors to reduce costs of capturing this data
• Providing its members access to collective funding to pursue their educational missions
• Assisting members to improve their information infrastructures and documentation practices
• Negotiating digital rights with artists and artists estates and with museums in other countries
• Providing members access to each others holdings for their own educational uses

A Brief History of AMICO
Early in 1997, the AAMD (the Association of Art Museum Directors) invited its members to send representatives to an organizational meeting for what became AMICO. After a series of ad hoc meetings, AMICO was officially organized in October 1997, as a program of the Association of Art Museum Directors Educational Foundation, Inc., and the AMICO Board was constituted. In 1998, AMICO was separately incorporated as an independent non-profit corporation, ending its direct connection to the AAMD.

When AMICO was formed in the fall of 1997, the AMICO Executive Committee decided that rather than hiring a staff immediately, it would contract management of the Consortium to David Bearman and Jennifer Trant of Archives & Museum Informatics, who had led the planning process. Trant now serves as Executive Director, and Bearman as Director of Strategy and Research. As AMICO grows, so will the team of staff members that support its programs.