ART MUSEUM IMAGE CONSORITUM (AMICO)
UNIVERSITY TESTBED MEETING REPORT AVAILABLE

The report of the AMICO University Testbed Project, is now available on the
AMICO web site at http://www.amico.org. A narrative report summarizes the
University Testbed Meeting, held at Carnegie Mellon University in June.

The web site also includes many of the presentations made by participants
at that meeting which brought together the producers and users of the AMICO
Library.

For your convenience, the Executive Summary and outline of Lessons Learned
are reproduced below.

Best wishes,

jennifer

J. Trant, AMICO Executive Director.


================================
AMICO University Testbed Meeting
June 3-4, 1999
================================


Executive Summary

The Art Museum Image Consortium was formed in October 1997 after six months
of planning by the staff of its twenty-three founding member museums. In
the same month, AMICO issued a call-for-proposals from Universities
interested in becoming test sites for research on the prototype AMICO
Library which was scheduled to be available for the 1998-99 academic year.
In January, 1998, the AMICO Board, acting on recommendations from its Users
and Uses Committee, accepted research proposals from 16 universities to
take part in the "AMICO University Testbed".

The University Testbed AMICO Library when released in July 1998 consisted
of documentation for almost 20,000 works of art. University Testbed
participants each made different kinds of uses of the AMICO Testbed
Library, and conducted different types of research on its uses. In the
spring of 1999, they were invited to propose papers on their experiences
for a research conference capping the testbed year. Papers were accepted
from eight Testbed Universities, and combined with a paper from AMICO on
its data processing, one from members on their methods, one from AMICO's
testbed Library distributor, the Research Libraries Group, and one from a
research team at Cornell University which had been hired by AMICO to
conduct an independent analysis of Library use. The conference program was
announced to coincide with the day before, and first day of, the AMICO
members meetings so as to encourage AMICO members to attend the meeting in
order to help shape the agenda for AMICO in 1999 and beyond.

Papers were delivered in six sessions over two days. The first day was
designed to give everyone a common sense of what had occurred in the
Testbed year on campus, online, and in the trenches where the AMICO Library
was made and delivered. In the first session, on Teaching with the AMICO
Testbed Library, Michael May (University of Alberta) and Jeffrey Howe and
Marc O'Connor (Boston College) illustrated two highly successful uses of
relatively small selected subsets of the AMICO Library in art history
(Canadian art) and general humanities (honors seminar) teaching by highly
motivated instructors. In the second session on Who Uses the AMICO Library,
researchers at CMU, Cornell University and AMICO reported on qualitative
interviews, quantitative surveys and focus groups that sought to find out
why users were using the Library and what they hoped to achieve. In the
third session, museum participants in AMICO reported on how they created
their AMICO contributed data, AMICO staff discussed the processing steps,
and Arnold Arcolio of the Research Libraries Group discussed the RLG
delivery system.

The second day began with a session on how Rochester Institute of
Technology, Washington University, Western Michigan University and the
University of Toronto encouraged faculty use of AMICO. The strategies were
different but the underlying problem was the same - faculty needed
considerable hands on help and even examples of uses, in order to
participate. In the fifth session, other uses beyond the classroom were
discussed. Eelco Bruinsma reported on the widespread effect of AMICO on
imaging and print work at the University of Leiden. Tammy Sopinski reported
on plans to integrate the AMICO Library into museum education in the state
of Minnesota. And June Ward reported on a project to exploit the AMICO
Library in K-12 education in greater Indianapolis. The day ended with an
open discussion of lessons learned and suggestions to AMICO members about
ways to strengthen the Library and its delivery.

The Presentation Slides used by many of the speakers can be found on the
AMICO Web site, linked to the formal meeting program. See
http://www.amico.org This summary highlights the issues dicussed and
themes explored.


=========================================
Lessons from the AMICO University Testbed
=========================================

Teaching
* Interest in/uses for digital art images is strong beyond art history
* Focused study, using AMICO in assignments or projects is most effective
* Adequate local technological infrastructure is essential
* Publicity and administrative buy-in assist in AMICO adoption
* Technological training for faculty overcomes resistance to use
* When used, teacher and student response is positive - they want more.

User Studies
* AMICO adoption is slow within the University community as a whole
* Enthusiastic individuals made use of AMICO in many disciplines
* Users find it useful, like the functionality and information
* Art professionals want to integrate AMICO/content from other sources
* Non-art professionals more likely to use AMICO in classroom

Organizational Structure
* Cross-functional teams aid in establishing AMICO in a university
* Librarians, faculty from many departments, administration, technical
resources contribute to successful instructional use
* To insure success institution administrations need to:
        - make a commitment to curriculum that uses resources like AMICO
        - recognize faculty who invest in innovative teaching (esp. tenure)
        - provide time and training to faculty

Training
* Step by step training is essential for faculty adoption
* Documentation is important for self-tutoring and referral
* Students benefit from hands-on workshops and search criteria advice
* Need to tailor training to user needs

AMICO MEMBERS Perspectives
* AMICO members are still learning about effective multimedia documentation
of art
* AMICO members working to establish "best practices" to improve data
* Members want to incorporate AMICO into day-to-day processes
* K-12 curriculum development with AMICO is an exciting opportunity
* Opening up potential users of AMICO to a really wide population
* Different set of teacher and student requirements in the K-12 sector
* IUPUI project will look to set "best practices" for K-12 use of this digital
image resource


===============
CALL FOR PAPERS
===============

The AMICO University Testbed: Reflections, Results and Recommendations
A Special Issue of Archives and Museum Informatics: the cultural heritage
informatics quarterly.

In the 1998/1999 academic year a select group of university campuses had
beta access to the AMICO Library, a collection of museum multimedia
documenting the collections of 23 AMICO member institutions. Selected based
on a competitive call for proposals participating campuses pursued research
into the ways in which the AMICO Library could be used, and the issues and
opportunities presented by such a collection.

Papers that report on the experience of the AMICO University Testbed are
invited from both AMICO Members and Testbed participants. We are
particularly interested in explorations of issues involved in the creation
of the AMICO Library, reflections on the its delivery and reports on
patterns of adoption. Papers that explore effective models for integrating
museum multimedia into teaching and research at colleges and universities
are welcome, as are more forward-thinking reflections of methods to
encourage dialogue between museums and the users of museum multimedia
documentation.

Selected papers will be published in Archives and Museum Informatics, the
cultural heritage informatics quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal from
Kluwer Academic Publishers. See http://www.kap.nl

Deadline for Submission: July 31, 1999.

Questions or Comments: Email Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, AMICO,
[log in to unmask]

Guidelines for Authors can be found at
http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/armu.guide.html
________
J. Trant                        2008 Murray Ave, Suite D
Executive Director              Pittsburgh, PA 15217 USA
Art Museum Image Consortium
http://www.amico.org            Phone: +1 412 422 8533
[log in to unmask]                Fax: +1 412 422 8594
________
________
J. Trant                        2008 Murray Ave, Suite D
Executive Director              Pittsburgh, PA 15217 USA
Art Museum Image Consortium
http://www.amico.org            Phone: +1 412 422 8533
[log in to unmask]                Fax: +1 412 422 8594
________

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