Digital Image Collections Consolidation in Shared Shelf
For almost a decade, we have been supporting and maintaining the LUNA Insight and ARTstor visual image delivery platforms for various types of visual resources. LUNA was added earlier as an asset manager for images, and many of our legacy collections were until very recently housed there. The LUNA architecture was administrated in-house. ARTstor was added somewhat later to the CUL repository landscape, and by contrast is a hosted platform. The strength of ARTstor is its flexibility to meet users’ specific needs, and the ease with which we can build new digital collections.
Since 2009, Cornell University Library has been in partnership with ARTstor in the development Shared Shelf. Our involvement informs us that the newer system is more effective in meeting CUL’s increasing needs in building and supporting visual image collections as well as supporting their integration in teaching and learning. As the number of collections in ARTstor and Shared Shelf rapidly grew, we reached a tipping point that motivated us to plan for the migration of our legacy collections from LUNA to ARTstor, consolidating the collections, and streamlining our collective effort toward maintaining fewer platforms.
The migration process was exactly what we anticipated it to be – complex and challenging. Most collections were migrated to ARTstor and Shared Shelf. The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art collection is migrated to eMuseum. eMuseum is a powerful web publishing toolkit that integrates with The Museum System (TMS), the collection management software that HFJ Museum uses.
There were a myriad of details to work through in most cases, many stakeholders to coordinate. However, the migration has also has been rewarding: the migration process gave us opportunity to normalize collections for preservation purposes by organizing and archiving master files in more meaningful way.
Last week, we concluded the migration and decommissioned LUNA. We are grateful to the Visual Resources Working Group for providing input and guidance during this project. We would especially like to specifically thank the Jason Kovari, Danielle Mericle, Liz Muller, Hannah Marshall, Rhea Garen for their key roles in this effort. If you have any question, please send an email to mailto:VRHELP-L@list.cornell.edu.
ARTstor provides access to our restricted digital image collections. These collections are restricted to Cornell University faculty, staff, and students for educational purposes (instruction, study, research, and scholarship) only. Here are the instructions on how to remotely access collections off the campus.
Most of our digital image collections are available via Shared Shelf Commons, a free, open-access library of images from academic and cultural institutions.