Shared Shelf is Launched!

Megan Battey, Visual Resources Curator, reports that as of February 2011 Middlebury’s Visual Resources Collection is now accessible through ARTstor’s SharedShelf system. Shared Shelf is an on-line, cloud-based image management system for cataloging, accessing and using our local image collection seamlessly through the ARTstor interface. This offers many advantages – user-friendly cataloging tools, one-stop-shopping for our image users and reduced need for local infrastructure as our collection is now securely housed in “the cloud.” This represents the culmination of two years of work collaborating closely with ARTstor, LIS and eight other institutional partners (Colby, Cornell, Harvard, NYU, Society of Architectural Historians, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami and Yale University).

Middlebury’s is one of the first collections to go live in Shared Shelf, which will be released worldwide in July 2011. There are currently 3,143 images in the Middlebury collection, and the collection is growing as we continually add images to support the curriculum.

For more information about Shared Shelf, go to: http://www.artstor.org/shared-shelf/s-html/shared-shelf-home.shtml. To access our collection:

Users can search all ARTstor collections together, or just our local collection. Faculty and students are already enthusiastically using the system and Megan looks forward to demonstrating Shared Shelf’s features at upcoming LIS meetings.