AMICO Press Release

May 16, 2001
AMICO Headquarters; Pittsburgh, PA

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) has entered into a broad collaborative agreement with the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN). The two organizations will share knowledge and expertise in the networked delivery of cultural heritage. SCRAN plans to add The AMICO LibraryTM to the existing SCRAN services available to primary and secondary schools throughout the United Kingdom beginning in the fall of 2001, and may also distribute to Further and/or Higher Educational institutions and public libraries in the U.K. AMICO and SCRAN will share specifications and tools, explore issues of cross-resource access, and look to make SCRAN resources available in North America to educational subscribers.

As AMICO's Executive Director, Jennifer Trant, notes, "SCRAN has created a rich array of educational materials centered on Scottish cultural heritage. We hope that SCRAN subscribers will see The AMICO Library as a complementary addition to those materials, allowing for connections to be made across our two collections. We are excited to see our Members' collections available to U.K. primary and secondary school teachers and students. It broadens the educational reach of the museums we represent, and integrates nicely with our North American efforts to make The AMICO Library widely available to school users this fall." Bruce Royan, Executive Director of SCRAN, concurs, "The AMICO Library will be a welcome addition to the current resources we deliver. The diverse connections to be made between collections, educators, and students should be a natural and vibrant outgrowth of this agreement."

SCRAN was founded by a partnership of the National Museums of Scotland (NMS), the Scottish Museums Council (SMC) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). Also on the SCRAN Board are representatives of the British Computer Society (BCS), the Conference of Scottish Higher Education Principals (COSHEP) and the Learning and Teaching Scotland (LT Scotland), under the Chairmanship of Lady Balfour of Burleigh. SCRAN is available at a wide range of community information points, including schools, libraries, museums, community centres and tourist information centers.

A central co-ordinating body signs a licence agreement form and SCRAN provides a site licence, password and username for each participating institution. This allows them to access and download large sized images and fully operational video and audio files. These, together with a range of tools and CD-ROMs may be used copyright cleared for teaching and learning. Personal licenses are also available for home use. SCRAN is accessible via the World Wide Web and its resources will also be available on CD-ROM and other multimedia formats as they develop. Today, SCRAN contains 700,000 text records of historic monuments and of artefacts held in Scottish museums, galleries and archives, plus 120,000 related multimedia resources. In addition, SCRAN will have commissioned 70 multimedia essays, based on these resources, for educational use.

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is an independent non-profit corporation with 501 (c) 3 designation from the IRS. Founded in 1997 with 23 Members, the Consortium today is made up of over 30 major museums in the United States and Canada. It's an innovative collaboration - not seen before in museums - that shares, shapes, and standardizes digital information regarding museum collections and enables its educational use. Membership is open to any institution with a collection of art.

AMICO Members make annual contributions of multimedia documentation of works in their museums' collections. This is regularly compiled and made available as The AMICO Library to universities, colleges, schools, and public libraries. The 2001-2002 edition of The AMICO Library documents approximately 75,000 different works of art, from prehistoric goddess figures to contemporary installations. More than simply an image database, works in The AMICO Library are fully documented and may also include curatorial text about the artwork, detailed provenance information, multiple views of the work itself, and other related multimedia. "Subscribers find The AMICO Library valuable because it combines the immediacy and accessibility of the Web with the persistence and academic weight of traditional library reference sources," states Ms. Trant.

The AMICO Library is accessible over secure networks to institutional subscribers including universities, colleges, libraries, schools, and museums, and is now licensed to over 2 million users, including faculty, students, teachers, staff, and researchers. Educational institutions may subscribe to The AMICO Library by contacting one of its distributors. These include the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK), and now SCRAN. A subscription to the AMICO Library provides a license to use works for a broad range of educational purposes. Potential subscribers may preview a Thumbnail Catalog of the AMICO Library and get further information at http://www.amico.org.

Current AMICO Members

Albright-Knox Art Gallery Art Gallery of Ontario Art Institute of Chicago Asia Society Gallery Center for Creative Photography Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Cleveland Museum of Art Dallas Museum of Art Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College Denver Art Museum Detroit Institute of Arts Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco The Frick Collection and Art Reference Library George Eastman House J. Paul Getty Museum

The Library of Congress Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Minneapolis Institute of Arts MontrZ˙al Museum of Fine Arts MusZ˙e d'art contemporain de MontrZ˙al Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Gallery of Canada National Museums of Scotland Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Philadelphia Museum of Art San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Smithsonian American Art Museum Walker Art Center The Walters Art Museum Whitney Museum of American Art

AMICO Jennifer Trant Executive Director Art Museum Image Consortium Phone (412) 422 8533 Email: jtrant@amico.org http://www.amico.org

SCRAN Prof. Bruce Royan CEO Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network Phone: +44 131 662 1211 Email: brucer@scran.ac.uk http://www.scran.ac.uk