Artstor is a non-profit organization founded by the Mellon Foundation in New York. It was essentially a tech “startup” that developed a subscription-based digital image library and media management software.
We worked on a bi-weekly basis to add new content to the website.
Newly released collections were usually featured on the Artstor homepage. I curated the images that best represented the collection. If more than one collection was released during a refresh, I chose the collection that would generate the most excitement based on user feedback.
Artstor Digital Library users were also contributors. We collected images from all over the world. And provided subscription access to institutions all over the world.
However, not everyone could see the same images as copyright law is different from country to country. Let’s just say that it’s hard to be an art history student in France.
It was my team that pitched to potential collection contributors (museums, libraries, archives, artists, etc.) to ask for their digitized images.
And to give them to us for free.
Oh and we’d also be charging them to subscribe to Artstor.
Yes, you can “just get images off the web,” but do you really want to do that?
Why not get relevant curated keyword search results for art professionals, educators, and students instead?
We improved the interface of the Artstor Digital Library quite often. This was mainly done from user feedback that came through from the User Services department who provided tech support directly to users.
I switched out and added new collection thumbnails to this page every 2-3 weeks to keep it fresh.
We were always improving the software tools that came along with a subscription to the Artstor Digital Library.
I worked with the User Services team to promote new features and functions on our website, social media, and email blasts. If there were no new features or functions during a particular cycle, we’d promote existing ones as a reminder.
In an effort to clean up duplicates, we created a new feature called Associated Images and bundled similar images together, indicated as such by a tiny icon.
Tiny icons were pretty hard to get right despite how simple they may seem. We went through several rounds of them before decidi.
The Met was the first institution to provide free image downloads of copyright-free artwork. This was a growing trend from that point forward. Other museums started to follow suit.
During my time at Artstor, we were developing a DAM solution of our own called Shared Shelf. (The head of IT wanted to call it “Beaver.” We weren’t jazzed about Shared Shelf, but it was a lot better than the alternative so it stuck.)
We were constantly testing iterations of Shared Shelf. We tested target user groups at conferences and we also did usability testing within staff. I really enjoyed observing others use SS as well as participating in testing as a user myself.