Abstract:

The University of California Shared Images project (UCSI) is led by the Digital Special Collections Group at California Digital Library. UCSI is a collaborative image collection project across eight University of California (UC) campuses. The collection aggregates tens of thousands of images of art and art history intended for classroom instruction. The images derive primarily from individual Visual Resources Collections at the eight participating UC institutions. The Visual Resources Collections and the libraries assign a Collection Development Liaison from each campus to participate in forming the collection. The USCI also contains licensed image collections from Saskia Art & Architecture, Harthill Archive, and Archivision purchased with a consortial agreement. The entirety of the USCI collection is currently hosted through the ARTstor interface at http://www.artstor.org/ together with over one million ARTstor collection images. The UCSI collection is only open to the UC community.

This paper discusses the shared objectives and outcomes of the USCI project. The principals and goals of the project are illustrated and the complications and successes of such a project are outlined. Considerations such as digital preservation and shared metadata guidelines are also discussed.