Luna Imaging's Insight® Software Provides Dynamic Access to Important Collection

SAN FRANCISCO, CA- April 8, 2002
The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) and Cartography Associates, owned by map collector David Rumsey, signed a distribution agreement that provides online access to The AMICO Library™ for the Fall 2002 school year using Luna Imaging's Insight® software. The distribution agreement advances the mutual goal of AMICO and David Rumsey to provide a broader range of educational and scholarly users with access to this important collection of artwork that covers all periods of art and contains diverse forms, such as paintings, sculpture, print, drawings, photographs and decorative arts.

David Rumsey's vision coordinates well with AMICO's desire to widen and deepen educational use of museum collections through network technologies, says AMICO's Executive Director Jennifer Trant.

"Cartography Associates is a wonderful addition to our growing group of distributors," Trant says. "David Rumsey's experience with online image distribution and his alliance with Luna Imaging are of great interest to AMICO. We hope these connections will help build links to and added functionality for a much broader range of scholarly users of The AMICO Library in communities beyond those we currently serve."

Cartography Associates also provides online distribution of digital images from Rumsey's private collection of rare 18th and 19th century North and South American maps. The David Rumsey Map Collection, one of the largest private map collections in the United States, numbers over 150,000 maps and includes rare atlases, charts, globes, wall maps and related items. The online collection, currently numbering over 6,500 maps, is a growing cross section of the physical collection and is highly regarded by researchers and the public alike, as evidenced by the thousands of Web site visitors each day to www.davidrumsey.com.

The addition of The AMICO Library as the second collection distributed by Cartography Associates supports David Rumsey's vision to provide a broad range of cultural materials to both educators and scholars in ways never before achievable for scholarly exploration, at the highest level of quality possible using the Internet. More than an image database, works in The AMICO Library, which range from prehistoric goddess figures to contemporary installations, are fully documented and may also include curatorial text about the artwork, provenance information, multiple views of the work itself and other related multimedia.

"I am pleased to be able to bring this important collection from major museums together with powerful software that I believe in," Rumsey says. "I want to make the availability of The AMICO Library as affordable and as accessible to as many people as possible."

Like the David Rumsey Map Collection, Cartography Associates will rely on Luna Imaging's Insight software as the interface to support delivery of The AMICO Library. For current Insight users, adding The AMICO Library to their digital collections will be as simple as adding a password to Insight by the Insight administrator. Cartography Associates will make The AMICO Library available to institutions, researchers and educational users for an annual subscription rate.

"My relationship with Luna will allow us to serve customers for the Fall 2002 school year by offering an exciting array of software tools for accessing and viewing this outstanding collection of art images," Rumsey says. Luna Imaging will provide hosting and customer support services for the collection.

Insight® is a rich software tool for researchers, professors, students and collections managers, who work with image and multimedia collections. Instructors using Insight® can easily search and select images and other related multimedia from The AMICO Library, prepare lectures, and display presentations in the classroom or remotely over a secure Internet connection.

AMICO, a non-profit museum membership organization, has built and continues to expand The AMICO Library through annual contributions from its 36 member institutions. It's an innovative collaboration - not seen before in museums - that shares, shapes, and standardizes digital information regarding museums collections and enables its educational use. Membership is open to any institution with a collection of art. For further information about AMICO, contact Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, at 412 422 8530, or email info@amico.org.

Cartography Associates provides online presentation of historical maps and other culturally significant materials for research and education using the Internet. The David Rumsey Map Collection site has been featured in Wired Magazine, USA Today, and TechTV and has received numerous Web awards, including Yahoo Pick of the Week, and Best of the Net from About.com. For more information regarding the availability of The AMICO Library from Cartography Associates contact Jennifer Zabriskie at 310 274 8787, ext 121.

Luna Imaging, Inc., is based in Culver City, CA. Luna Imaging (www.lunaimaging.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 collections over the Internet.

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