Art Libraries Society of North America 31^st Annual Conference
Wyndham Baltimore Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland - March 20-26, 2003 

Session 7

Monday, March 24, 2003
8-9:30 a.m.  

A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words: Art Images, Copyright and E-Journals

Sponsored by The H.W. Wilson Company  

Session Leaders:
Eve Sinaiko, Director of Publications, College Art Association
Heidi McGregor, Director of Publisher Relations, JSTOR
Conna Clark, Manager, Rights and Resproductions, Philadelphia Museum of Art  

Organizer, Moderator: 
Cara List, University of Oregon  

Session Recorder:
Deborah K. Ultan, University of Minnesota

Session attendees for “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words” occupied every chair in the room and then seating spilled onto the floor.  Aware of the surprising popularity of this session, panelist Eve Sinakio, Editor for the College Art Association, remarked “this must be a topic many people are worried about.”   Discussion commenced by addressing the issue of why art publications are so far behind other fields with its use of electronic publishing.  Sinaiko began by explaining the obvious: The field of art and art publications rely on images more than other fields and the process of clearing copyright for art images can be prohibitive.  The routine process for publishing art works has issues in and of itself, Sinaiko pointed out, and that model does not even necessarily apply to the electronic realm. A good model for an electronic art journal is the Nineteenth Century Art Online -- http://19thc-artworldwide.org/ 

Sinaiko focused mainly on publishing in print, and illustrated some of the copyright issues: While a major work on Monet, for example, needs to be accompanied by images and preferably in color, a catalogue raisonne requires a complete copy of all of the known images produced by an artist.  But clearing images for copyright is a costly process, she explained, and since publishing houses are not wealthy they need to be certain that a book will sell to a large audience. In this scenario, the catalogue raisonne may never make it to print.   Sinaiko described the factors a publishing house must consider when making a decision about what to publish: How difficult will it be to obtain reproduction rights?  How much will it cost to get rights? (a book on twentieth century art, for example, could cost up to $300,000 for the image rights alone) What are the restrictions involved with reproducing the images? Can the images be easily collected from the public domain or from private collections only?  In closing, Sinaiko emphasized that publishers will make decisions according to ‘risk assessment’. 

Heidi McGregor, Director of Public Relations, JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive, focused her presentation on the issues of electronic archiving as related to the goals of JSTOR.  McGregor first explained that JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization and a digital archive of scholarly journals. JSTOR is taking responsibility to work out the challenges of electronic archiving and the complexities of archiving to scholarship, while also attempting to provide a place for preserving public documents.  Like a library, JSTOR provides availability and stewardship of academic journals.  The primary challenge of digitizing scholarly art journals, she explained, is copyright, and also issues of electronic preservation.  The guiding principle behind the digitization project is that the end product must retain the look and feel of the original, the images remain integral to the text. 

Historically, JSTOR has digitized only thumbnail images, but their plan is to instead use a TIFF format with 300 dpi in order to “preserve the essence of the image.” JSTOR is currently consulting with the Digital Library Federation on electronic presentation of images. The goal is to present the images within the content, capture the location coordinates of the images on the page, as in the original journal, and to create a composite page that is an exact facsimile.  In order to streamline the process of gaining the permissions for each image in all of the back issues of the journals, JSTOR is working with the Art History project to instead gain permission from the journals

themselves for the page "image." The future goal for JSTOR is to be able to provide a mechanism where discrete elements of the images such as artist, title of piece, date, etc. can be searched.

The ‘rights and legal’ issues that JSTOR routinely faces have to do with the fact that the journals have more than just the content -- there is also the advertising, for example.  Since JSTOR plans to preserve exact replicas of the journals and all aspects of the published presentation, the process is complicated.  McGregor used the U.S. Supreme Court case between a freelance author and the New York Times (New York Times Co., Inc., et al. v. Tasini et al.), as an example of case law related to technology, publishing and copyright.  Because of this case, authors and publishers are now more actively seeking electronic rights.  McGregor admits that JSTOR is just beginning to work out these issues, and commented that the restrictions and cost of obtaining rights is rather discouraging.  JSTOR identified 12 core art history journals that they would like to digitize.  So far the seven that have agreed to participate include the Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington, Gesta, Society of Architectural Historians, Warburg, and October.  JSTOR will ensure, she said, the comprehensive preservation of intellectual heritage while accounting for the interests of the stakeholders.

Conna Clark, Manager of Rights and Reproductions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was the final presenter.  While she admittedly spoke on behalf of the museum’s role with copyright and publishing issues, she also emphasized the fact that every museum administrates these issues differently.  On this point, she stated, “Every museum is its own community and idiosyncratic to the extreme.”  Museums are similar, however, in how they are particularly sympathetic to the issues of copyright and publishing.  They function not only as archivists but are authors of content, content providers and content seekers, and involved at points of the copyright issues. Museums, said Clark, follow the topic with great interest, since it serves in part their mission to promote education.  Accordingly, museums are attentive to the quality of reproductions, the quality of information, and the internal and external constituencies from which they sell or get images. 

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Clark can ensure quality reproductions but bears in mind market trends.  Formats for public use and scholarship may differ and require the museum to be flexible with requests, just as the curators that provide the information that accompany the images can be only so absolute about facts.  Quality, in this case, is relative.  In closing, Clark revealed that she is not concerned about how much the big publishers are getting their images online, but suspects this approach may dilute image reproduction standards.

The session was lively, information rich and raised important and engaging questions. The questions that followed the presentations considered donor and copyright issues, how to handle works unattributed to authorship, the Faxon issue, license fees, and how aggressively JSTOR will pursue art journals.