Collaborative Cultural Resource Creation: the example of the Art Museum Image Consortium

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) made a library of digital multimedia documentation of more than 50,000 works of art available under subscription to educational institutions in 1999. In so doing, it forged a new model of how museums and the educational sector might together create and sustain multimedia digital libraries, respecting copyright and making rich content available at an acceptablecost. In this paper, we examine AMICO’s experience to analyze the common challenges that must be faced by any digital library construction project. A digital cultural heritage resource will be built on the collections of numerous repositories why would these institutions want to collaborate and how can the persuaded to continue to work together? It will digitize only a fraction of the possible material within its scope (especially in its first few years) – how will collection development decisions be made? It will represent existing content in digital form – what standards will it impose? It will create a copyright protected product and typically use copyright protected material – how will it acquire and protect intellectual property? It will be created in order to be used – what delivery systems will be deployed to provide access and by whom/for whom will they be operated? Such a resource will cost a great deal, especially when considered over many years – how can funding be sustained, who will pay for it and how will the funds be used?