Improved Access to Digital Art Database for Educational and Research Use

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, July 3, 2001
RLG (the Research Libraries Group) and Luna Imaging, Inc., announced an agreement today for use of Luna's Insight® software to enhance online use of the RLG-distributed AMICO Library™. The AMICO Library™ is an online repository of art from the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) containing multimedia documentation of works in leading museums.

The agreement furthers Luna's and RLG's shared vision to provide access to the broadest range of high-resolution digital image collections for research and scholarly use. It also provides RLG the opportunity to offer its members discounted pricing on a broad range of Luna services, backed by Luna's vast experience in scanning cultural resource materials and in creating and operating on-site digital studios for universities and museums.

"RLG members represent some of the greatest universities, museums, national libraries, independent libraries, archives, and historical societies. We're honored to be able to work with RLG to encourage new approaches to research and learning," says Luna Imaging president and founder Michael Ester. "The availability of The AMICO Library within Insight will give users rewarding new ways to work with art images in teaching and research."

The AMICO Library™ is a growing collection that covers all periods of art and contains diverse forms, such as paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, and decorative arts. RLG will make the new, enlarged edition of The AMICO Library, comprising over 77,000 works of art, available for subscription worldwide in the 2001-2002 academic year through the Insight® software. Among these works are high-quality digital images of contemporary art, African, Native American and Inuit art, ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian works, Japanese and Chinese works, and more.

Each work is represented in The AMICO Library by one or more digital images and a catalog record. Many include multiple views of the work and further multimedia documentation, such as sound and video of artists, curatorial commentaries on works, Antenna Audio™ sound files from museums' audio exhibition tours, conservation history, provenance data, and scanned exhibition catalogs and publications.

By providing access to The AMICO Library through Luna's Insight® software, RLG will enable its users to take advantage of a rich software tool developed over nearly a decade with the input of researchers, professors, students, and collection managers who work with image collections.

"RLG and Luna are natural allies," says RLG product manager Ricky Erway. "We want RLG-provided images and data to be easily used with tools that enable image integration for classroom applications. Luna's software was designed for precisely this purpose and is already being used by some of the more demanding and prestigious universities in the country." Through Insight®, users can dynamically view and work with visual materials online. Instructors can prepare image lectures in the office and display Insight® presentations in the classroom with digital projectors or monitors. Presentations can be as simple as choosing and sequencing full screen images-or they can incorporate several images at once to show details and side-by-side comparisons.

As a separate component to the relationship, Luna offers to provide special support for RLG's members as they develop their digitization efforts. Many leading institutions already use Luna's digital imaging operations in California, as well as Luna-created and -operated scanning facilities at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Based in Culver City, California, Luna Imaging Inc. (luna-imaging.com) enables museums, libraries, and archives to build and distribute high-quality visual collections in digital form and provides sophisticated software to access and use image, audio, and video collections over the Internet.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, RLG (www.rlg.org) is a not-for-profit membership corporation of over 160 universities, national libraries, archive, and other memory institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. In addition to a range of collaborative activities that address members' shared goals, RLG develops and operates databases and software to serve the information needs of institutions and individuals anywhere in the world. RLG has been distributing The AMICO Library™ since its inception in 1998.

The Art Museum Image Consortium (www.amico.org) is a growing not-for-profit membership organization (currently with 31 members) dedicated to enabling educational use of museum multimedia by shaping, sharing, and standardizing data about members' collections to create a collective digital library. The AMICO Library™ is offered under license to educational subscribers world-wide, including colleges, universities, schools, public libraries, art galleries and museums.

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