The AMICO Library and Testbed, 1998-99

This site was frozen in 2004 and is now out of date. Please go to RLG's current Web site for all information. Questions? Contact us.

The AMICO Library^™ and Testbed, 1998-99

The AMICO Library^™ is available now!
On August 24, 1998, the Research Libraries Group and the Art Museum Image Consortium formally launched the testbed year for initial use and evaluation of The AMICO Library—a collection of over 20,000 documented, digitized images contributed by major art museums for licensed use by institutions of higher education. The RLG News gave a lively overview of the ways AMICO and its members, RLG, and the university testbed users worked together and of what they wanted to achieve.
The testbed served three major purposes:

to test a framework for collective licensing of museum digital collections;
to evaluate a means for delivering the AMICO content to the higher education community;
to explore issues surrounding the use of digital tools and reference resources in the educational process.

During the year-long testbed and evaluation, only universities that signed on for the project and AMICO's museum members used The AMICO Library, mounted at RLG and distributed through an enhanced version of RLG's Eureka interface for Web users. Here are some sample images and records from the AMICO testbed. In September 1999, The AMICO Library^™ became available by subscription.
AMICO was formed by the Association of Art Museum Directors Educational Foundation, Inc., as a not-for-profit consortium that licenses the content of museums collectively as a means of distributing information to the educational community. The membership is expected to continue to grow and The AMICO Library is projected to expand by as many as 50,000 images yearly. The AMICO Library will continue to be the focus for research and learning about the educational and scholarly use of museum images.
More about subscribing to The AMICO Library

Last updated 14 September 2000

This site was frozen in 2004 and is now out of date. Please go to RLG's current Web site for all information. Questions? Contact us.
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