Background: UC Shared Images

In 2007, the CDL Image Service Strategic Planning team re-envisioned a shared service that would leverage CDL’s strengths in licensing and facilitation to bring together image collections from each campus for sharing across the University of California system.  CDL has joined forces with nine UC campuses to implement this service.

In consultations with the UC libraries, visual resources curators and other image stakeholders, the following principles and goals were identified by CDL for supporting shared image collections for teaching and learning at the University of California:

Principles

• Facilitate resource sharing and co-investment
• Reduce redundant effort (e.g., digitizing the same image twice)
• Create efficiencies for users and contributors (e.g., simplifying workflow and user experience)
• Anticipate future needs and trends.

Goals

• Provide an infrastructure for visual resources curators to contribute images to a shared institutional collection
• Provide access to licensed images when the vendor does not provide access
• Provide and manage end-user access to images
• Enable use of images in the classroom (at a minimum, provide sufficient image size for projection)
• Enable faculty to share images with students (at a minimum, enable output to learning management systems, course websites)
• Enable faculty to reuse images in the future.

What are UC Shared Images collections?

They are image collections from UC campuses that are openly accessible to all other UC campuses subscribing to ARTstor.  UC Shared Images is a type of image collection cooperative.  Each campus manages its own collections, which they load into ARTstor as institutional hosted collections. Together, these individual collections comprise UC Shared Images.

How will users recognize UC Shared Images collections in ARTstor?

Collection names are preceded by “UC Share” to identify them as part of UC Shared Images. For example, “UC Share: CDL Saskia Art and Architecture” is a collection managed by CDL.

Who will build and manage these collections?

Visual Resources Curators at campuses will be the first to build UC Shared Images collections in ARTstor. They will add an estimated 100,000 images in the first year.  CDL will add CDL licensed collections. While initially focused on providing images for teaching within the arts and humanities, UC Shared Images will be broadly useful for other disciplines campus-wide.  UC Santa Cruz, in making their collection available to other UC campuses in ARTstor in fall 2007, was the first to participate in UC Shared Images.  The UC Libraries Collection Development Committee (CDC) will appoint a collection liaison at each campus to manage collection building.

How do you make a collection part of UC Shared Images?

After an institutional collection is loaded into ARTstor, the campus collection liaison asks ARTstor to open access to the collection to all UC campuses.

What is excluded from UC Shared Images?

UC Shared Images does not include ARTstor personal collections or collections that are only available to a single campus. CDL will not work with campuses on the storage of the master images from these collections.  CDL cannot ensure the “recreation” of these collections in the event that UC Shared Images moves to a different platform.  This is the sole responsibility of the local collection owner.

Who has access?

UC Shared Images is uniquely poised to make essential images for teaching broadly available for faculty and students campus-wide and more importantly, UC-wide. Faculty, students, and staff across all UC campuses that subscribe to ARTstor will have access to UC Shared Images. Users will be able to seamlessly search across UC Shared Images and the 750,000 images (and growing) in the ARTstor digital library.

Three Levels Of Collections Hosted By ARTstor

Personal Collections

• Open to whole campus OR make private by password
• Mostly used by instructors

Institutional Collections (2 types)

1. Open to a single campus
2. Open to all UC campuses: These are UC Shared Images collections

ARTstor Collections

• Collections donated to or acquired by ARTstor that become available to the entire ARTstor community. ARTstor assumes responsibility for these collections. (See “Interested in contributing images?” on the ARTstor website for details.)

Chart: ARTstor Access Levels & UC Shared Images [PDF]