INNOVATIVE DIGITAL-IMAGE TECHNOLOGY
TO BE INTRODUCED AT BMC

On Wednesday, April 28, The Center for Visual Culture's final colloquium of the semester will feature James Shulman, the executive director of ArtSTOR, an online repository of thousands of digital images. Bryn Mawr is one of a few institutions around the country that is beta-testing the project in advance of its official launch in July. Shulman's talk, "The Mission of ARTstor: Using digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields," will be held in Thomas 224 from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.; light refreshments will be served.

Developed with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, ArtSTOR will offer a catalog of almost 300,000 high-resolution digital images to institutions that subscribe to it. About 200,000 of the images were culled from the library and slide collection of the University of California at San Diego. Other important sources were a large collection of photos of Asian art at Ohio State University, the catalog of European engravings compiled by German collector Adam Bartsch and the Museum of Modern Art's Architecture and Design Collection. ArtSTOR plans to continue developing image collections "from across many time periods and cultures that will, in the aggregate, have sufficient depth, breadth and coherence to support a wide range of educational and scholarly opportunities," says the ArtSTOR Web site.

Professors and students at subscriber institutions will have access to the entire catalog. Users can browse through the catalog or search for images using a variety of criteria. Images can be grouped and sorted for study or presentation, and the software included with a subscription allows a user to select a detail and zoom in for a high-resolution rendering of it.

In his years at the Mellon Foundation, which supports the ArtSTOR project, Shulman has participated in the construction of large databases, and researched and written about educational policy issues and the missions of not-for-profit institutions. He has also served as the Foundation's financial and administrative officer and assisted in the management of its endowment. Shulman collaborated with William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions and wrote The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values with Bowen. His Ph.D. dissertation for Yale University was the basis for his 1998 book The Pale Cast of Thought: Hesitation and Decision in the Renaissance Epic.

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