AsianDOC E-Newsletter 1:1 Asia Society Initiatives

AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter 1:1(March 1998)

Asia Society Initiatives

by Hylton Jolliffe, Manager, AsiaSociety.org

The Asia Society's web site is constantly expanding, adding the full text of our new publications, dozens of new, annotated links a month, special features such as a Shockwave Flash "movie" of the Asia Society's permanent collection of Asian Art or a special section on the U.S.-China Summit of this past fall. Interactive site areas include Roundtables, an active forum for discussion on topics including Politics and Society, Arts and Culture and Education, and a unique feature we've developed called Network where like-minded individuals can find each other by selecting from more than 80 topics to define their interests, submitting their choices and searching our ever-expanding database by desired criteria for those who share their interests (I encourage you to try it - you can find it in our Politics & Society section). In addition we will soon be adding weekly the transcripts of many of the talks, seminars and discussions taking place in New York at our headquarters and at our Regional Centers in Australia, California, Hong Kong, Texas, and Washington, DC.

The Asia Society is also among the Founding Members of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), a nonprofit organization that will provide educational access to a joint multimedia digital library documenting works in the collections of the major North American art museums.

Access to the documentation held in museum collections has long been a problem, but what was an irritation in traditional scholarship has become a bottleneck in the networked educational environment. The digitized text, images, audio tours and multimedia being created in museums provide a rich source of content for on-line curriculum, and interest in their use is growing. But the cultural heritage community has lacked the economic and distribution systems to support this use. Both information providers and users in this sector acknowledge that new economic and social models are required in order to support the desired uses of digital information in learning, teaching, and research. A not-for profit Consortium that licenses the content of museums collectively is the most effective means of distributing museums' digital information to the educational community.

The directors and representatives of the founding art museums desire to take advantage of an emerging new educational opportunity.

Vishakha N. Desai, Vice President for Cultural Programs and Director of the Asia Society Galleries, said, "We are proud to be a part of this worthy project right from the start. The Asia Society's mission is to educate Americans about the cultures of Asia, and we are always looking for new ways to do that. As we move into the next century, making use of developing electronic technologies is essential. The Asia Society's collection of Asian art is a rare gem--it is a masterpiece collection formed by one of the greatest Asian art scholars in the world, Sherman Lee, for Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. We will be making this collection available for study at many levels and for people working in many disciplines including studies in art, history, religion and cultural anthropology. Through its accessibility on AMICO, many more people than we could ever have hoped to reach before will be learning about the many-faceted cultures of Asia through the collection. It is an invaluable tool that we will keep developing, constantly enriching the information we provide for perhaps thousands of people."

Working together through a six-month planning process, member museums have defined mechanisms for the collection and distribution of a multi-media digital library documenting and interpreting their collections. A set of agreements reflecting this consensus were drafted by Archives & Museum Informatics, who acted as consultants and facilitators throughout the AMICO planning process. These include frameworks for organizing the Consortium, governing its strategic planning, developing a standards-based approach to the distribution of the AMICO Library, and defining its products and licenses. Key among these are the draft University and Museum licenses, that outline the terms under which the library will be offered to these communities. AMICO's framework documents are available for public comment at: http://www.amn.org/AMICO

"AMICO is an unprecedented collaborative effort of many of the world's leading art museums. It seeks to make a sustained and significant contribution to the education of our young people about the history of art and its usefulness in studying countless aspects of the humanities and social sciences. AMICO will offer non-proprietary, networked access to images of and information about works of art scattered in dozens of major collections, and allow the casual user and scholar alike to sample and research works of art in our collective care," stated Maxwell L. Anderson, Director, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Director, Art Museum Network (www.AMN.org).

In order to prepare for our participation in the consortium, the Asia Society is in the process of digitizing the entire Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of Asian Art; we expect it to be available through AMICO and on our own website by this fall.

In addition to our participation in AMICO, we have several other projects worth noting. Among them are two initiatives related to our upcoming Japanese exhibition More Than Meets The Eye. We are in the process of creating a "3-D" gallery which we will feature on our web site which showcases the some forty pieces included in the show. Also, in 1986, Sylvan Barnet and William Burto published, with the Asia Society, an authoritative bibliography on Japanese art, A Reader's Guide to the Arts of Japan. Three years ago they created an updated version which was published by Abrams in Penelope Mason's "History of Japanese Art" (1994) - a general textbook. We have recently enlisted Barnet and Burto to update their bibliography for 1998 and plan to publish it on AsiaSociety.org by April.

http://www.asiasociety.org

URL http://asiandoc.lib.ohio-state.edu/v1n1/dbs/asiasociety.html

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