Review from: The Charleston Advisor, July 2006

Product Description
The designation and description of an act or object as art is a difficult task as it is subjected to institutional and academic standards as well as to aesthetic and cultural analysis. In visual terms, we have subjective descriptors swirling in a steaming pot of subjective stew. The contents of this soup, however, may be condensed, grouped, and organized into collections for easier digestion and access. H.W. Wilson’s Art Museum Image Gallery (AMIG) provides gustatory satisfaction by presenting a broad range of cultures and time periods ranging from 3,000 B.C. to the present from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (including Native American and Inuit art). There is noteworthy coverage of contemporary and modern art, including a modest but growing number of high quality multimedia files. It also covers fine and decorative art including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, costumes, jewelry, textiles, furniture, ceramics, glass, archaeological finds, books and manuscripts, etc. It can also be used to support the theatre department and community theatre research on set design by providing access to period costumes and furniture. As a result AMIG is prepared to illustrate, enrich, and support the education needs of a wide variety of multicultural studies such as archaeology, classics, religion, literature, area and cultural studies.

Compared to its current market competitors, AMIG has earned its own unique place as a worthy image database. Unlike most other image products, a researcher who has access to this database has the value-added ability to use the images in a variety of ways outside of the Wilson interface. The thorny issue of intellectual property is managed through Wilson’s negotiations with intellectual property service providers and cultural heritage institutions. These agreements have increased subscriber flexibility as they have enabled users to manipulate the images to suit their educational needs outside of the AMIG interface. The digital images this product provides can be used to enhance reports, lectures, professional presentations at a conference, and password protected course material used for educational purposes. The user, however, must be associated with the subscribing institution as faculty, staff, or student. Access may be granted to walk-ins, but they must adhere to the specified contract policies, including no public publishing of the images. Subscribers need to help implement and maintain appropriate authentication controls over computer network access (including the saving, e-mailing and printing of files) to maintain the contractual obligations of Wilson’s AMIG.

Products such as AMIG cannot be compared to, nor are they designed to compete with, such highly respected trusted archival resources as ARTstor (with almost 500,000 images to date), whose raison d’etre rises from an entirely different wellspring. AMIG’s existing strength and uniqueness lies in its useful pedagogical flexibility and affordability, thus attracting a different target audience. Another popular image database, Grove Art Online, provides Web access to articles and thumbnail images (2,500) within the text as well as external links to galleries and museums. Once again, unlike Wilson’s AMIG, copyright concerns can be an issue here when accessing images. RLG’s Catalog of Art Museum Images Online (CAMIO), AMIG’s closest counterpart, differs slightly with AMIG in that it currently holds: 88,863 images and offers museums the opportunity to make their images available for licensing through Trove.net, an open-Web image database, and receive revenues. Wilson’s AMIG also appears to have a searching/indexing advantage over CAMIO. All in all, despite any currently perceived drawbacks with respect to size of AMIG’s content as compared to other comparable or larger image collections, Wilson’s AMIG ameliorates many of these differences with its search ability, flexibility, educational usability, quality of digital content, and superb metadata.

Critical Evaluation

Content
As in any true art collection, it is the quality of content (whether global or local in its scope) that fosters and enhances credibility. H.W. Wilson’s Art Museum Image Gallery (AMIG) features nearly 100,000 high-quality, high-resolution images, virtually mirroring the valuable content researchers once enjoyed with the earlier Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO Library). The fact that AMIG enables the educational use of museum multimedia by ensuring that the images are clearly marked, rights-cleared and ready for use by students, researchers, and teachers alike make this a unique and valuable resource. Images are currently culled from the Library of Congress and 21 different North American museums (a list of the contributing museums can be found at <http://www.hwwilson.com/databases/artmuseum_ museums.htm>) along with most of the images (minus a couple of thousand) from the earlier AMICO Library (<http://www. amico.org>), which included 36 contributing North American museum members. The content focuses on presenting a cultural milieu that could be used to trace artistic development from Neolithic Sumerian art up through contemporary video artists such as Bill Viola.

All of the content is carefully selected and made accessible utilizing a high quality of cataloging and metadata standards. The data richness is noticeable once a search is initiated. Each piece of work has basic cataloging information and some works are enhanced with associated information such as curatorial texts, detailed provenance history, multiple views of the work, sound, and even video. Both students and researchers will appreciate the deep wells of visual and curatorial information that can be pooled, especially when they’re combined with other complementary Wilson products, i.e., Art Full Text, Art Retrospective, and/or Biography Reference Bank.
Improper utilization of image content can all too easily and unwittingly develop into a potentially contentious legal situation. For this reason, various database creators and vendors implement safeguards to properly address and protect copyright restrictions. Some of these may include the implementation of pay-per-view technologies, watermarks, and click-through barriers. Other image databases choose to safeguard their content by supporting the export of relatively low resolution images for the noncommercial purposes set forth in license agreements and terms and conditions of use. In comparison, AMIG provides rights-cleared, high-resolution images viewable in a variety of software applications that allow for useful cut and paste capability. A distribution agreement with Archives and Museum Informatics (A&MI) entitles AMIG subscribers to flexible, but restricted, use of the licensed database images. As a result, no software or slideshow applications within AMIG are necessary as they are, for example, within a product like ARTstor. Wilson’s AMIG already has standing agreements in place that are printed under each image enabling flexibility in image use.

The ability to work outside the database’s interface is of great value to the pedagogical community. Allowing visual resources to be incorporated into a variety of digital mediums ranging from Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to Word documents has the potential to broaden teaching and research opportunities that will provide a greater range of didactic experiences. Preparing papers and research documents that include visual documentation is as easy as a few clicks….

The image content is provided to the public through positive working relationships that exist between H.W. Wilson and the galleries and museums whose artworks are represented….

Interface
Translating visual works into a verbal form is obviously challenging. One of the most important elements in creating an effective index is to create a consistently used, common, descriptive vocabulary that produces relative and accurate results. Wilson has successfully manifested a very rich and comprehensive search template that takes advantage of 30 searchable fields within 3 search boxes (with limits by date, full text, peer-review, and page image) and 16 different browseable fields. A broad range of searches can be performed. Images may be accessed by artist (i.e., by name, birthplace, nationality), title of work, owner of work, owner of piece, date it was created, subject, materials used, technique employed, object type, etc.) For example, a search may target a specific type of image such as a photograph or lithograph or identify a list of artists who were born in a specific country (e.g., France). In this sense, AMIG is one the most “searchable” image databases available. WilsonLink, an OpenURL resolver that permits users to download records, access full text and tables of contents via providers, or search the desired subject on the Web, has the ability to enhance the searching experience….

The database is clean in its design and like all of the Wilson databases, AMIG utilizes Wilson’s Advanced, Basic, and Browse search options to initiate a search. Options to print, save, or e-mail records marked for retention are found on the side bar menu. Here the user can choose to print, save, or e-mail up to 100 marked records or records from the current search results. A Help button is also found on the side bar and includes tutorials and basic and advanced searching Help options. For a novice user these features are especially helpful in coming to understand the searchable fields and how they operate. A feedback form found here can be used to report any problems….The Thesaurus is a list of suggested subject headings and related terms used in the database’s controlled vocabulary. It is very helpful in identifying key search terms related to a user’s search.

Searching within AMIG is greatly aided by Wilson’s All-Smart Search, which functions much like a keyword search. It has added functionality in that it also searches the full text of any curatorial descriptions and bibliographic information. It ranks the results in order of relevancy with the most relevant images at the top of the results set. It is here that new revelations and insights about art and art history can be discovered. For example, if one performs a search for Thomas Hart Benton, an American Regionalist painter in the middle of the 1900s, the user will notice a few paintings by Jackson Pollock and may be inclined to investigate why they were returned as a relevant result. After further investigation, it would be found that Pollock once studied under Benton while a member of the Art Students League in New York City.

Once a user’s search returns a desirable results list, the user encounters a list of thumbnails with descriptions reading: title, artist, and year. An extra click from the bottom navigation bar is required to view the full record for each item. A full cataloging record displays all of the available curatorial information about each artwork. Many also include useful curatorial notes with detailed descriptions about the art piece. Once the full record is in view, the user may select the desired image for an even closer look….The high-resolution images download quickly and can be viewed in three image sizes. Some of the larger images are over 100 KB in size and translate extremely well for viewing in other programs; for example, it’s possible to add an image to text for a research paper or for a PowerPoint presentation. Searching and functionality are greatly enhanced when AMIG is combined with Wilson’s Art Full Text, Art Retrospective, and Biography Reference Bank databases.

Review Scores Composite: *** 3/4
The maximum number of stars in each category is 5.

Content: ***
Nearly 100,000 clearly noted rights-cleared images of high-resolution quality are the major selling points of this database and are what help to make this a unique and valuable resource. These provisions enable the educational use of museum multimedia for students, employees, researchers, and teachers who wish to incorporate works into their term papers, class and professional conference presentations, dissertations, theses, faculty portfolios, and classroom password-protected Web sites. The database has a great deal of potential and delivers on its promise of high quality images ready for educational use by any scholar with use privileges. Add on the Art Full Text, Art Retrospective, and/or Biography Reference Bank databases offered by H.W. Wilson and you have a very powerful tool.

Searchability: ****
Navigating Wilson’s revamped All-Smart Search template is simple enough for first time users yet allows for complex queries that will attract more advanced scholarly researchers. AMIG is fully integrated into the WilsonWeb search interface and can include features such as WilsonLink, an OpenURL resolver that has the ability to enhance the searching experience. Images may be accessed by 30 searchable fields, making this one of the most “searchable” image databases available. A small number of metadata errors were revealed; however, the overall results are very impressive.

Pricing Options: ****
The pricing is reasonable for what you get and is structured so that it is also accessible to smaller institutions with limited resources. AMIG is available to a wide range of size and type of institutions and includes consortial pricing. At first glance this product may not appear to compete with some grander initiatives of other image databases. However, given its clearly marked, high resolution, rights-cleared images along with steady increases in content, this truly versatile and highly useable product will most definitely find a solid niche in library collections of all levels and types that support art history, studio arts, design, and academic or community theatre programs.

Reviewed by:
Michelle Sitko, Assistant Professor, Coordinator of Collection Management Services/Head, Serials Department at Marywood University.
Jeff Boris is a digital serials assistant and trainer at Marywood University Library.