AMICO Executive Committee

Art Museum Information Consortium (AMICO)
Archives & Museum Informatics:
Activities Report
December 1998

Summary

New AMICO members began to contribute records for the 1999-2000 year, including 2 "rich" records per institution that are to become a test library for application developers. Although "declarations" of the contents of the 1999-2000 library were due from all members by the end of December, some had still not been received. AMICO is pushing for this information in order to make deadlines for developing literature to obtain subscribers for the library at conferences in late January and early February.

Full functionality of the interactive data validation, parsing, editing and maintenance functions were made available to members. Records now have thumbnails created for them and are fully validated for online editing. Agreements are in place with RLG to provide weekly updates to the AMICO database in 1999.

Negotiations with distributors led to agreement with the California Digital Library to develop an AMICO application in 1999. Negotiations of pricing and distribution terms continued with the Research Libraries Group and OhioLINK.

Jennifer and David continued their practice of giving briefings to the staff's of member institutions whenever their travel schedules allowed. In December, full staff briefings were given at SF MOMA. Plans were made to brief staff at San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with the Board meeting in January.

A Grant Proposal was submitted to the Getty Trust to fund focus group research with potential AMICO users at the VRA and CAA meetings in February. Preliminary plans were made for a conference on the University Testbed research to be held in June. Other research initiative of likely benefit to AMICO members were explored.

Detailed Reports:

Distributors: Meeting were held with the Research Libraries Group to work out details of the 1999-2000 year delivery schedule and issues of RLG's pricing and advertising for The AMICO Library. An agreement that RLG will accept updates to AMICO records on a weekly basis will make ongoing addition to and revision of the Library smoother. RLG and AMICO briefed each other on their contacts with potential distributors and subscribers.

Discussions with the California Digital Library resulted in a decision on their part to develop an AMICO application this spring and offer it to California universities next fall. Discussions with OhioLINK proceeded and both parties expect to reach agreement in time for the AMICO Board meeting in late January.

Rights
Negotiations with the Artists Rights Society were quiescent, but we know that our proposal has been received and is under active consideration.

R&D
AMICO was accepted as a partner in the ISAAC Network to test distributed metadata based searching of the Internet. If successful, this would have the effect of making individual works in The AMICO Library known to searchers in academic environments - bringing The AMICO Library to their attention as a resource.

Users and Uses
Discussions with Cornell University's Interactive Media Group which conducted the evaluation of "casual users" of MESL (those not showing/viewing MESL in a classroom), led to agreement that Cornell will conduct a similar analysis of users of The AMICO Library during the spring term of 1999.

Needs of the IUPUI IMLS Project for a license to public libraries and K-12 institutions led to discussions of the AMICO Rights Committee on terms for such licenses. IUPUI advertised for a project director. Plans were made to hold meetings in Indianapolis with the Public Library and School Advisory Committees for the IUPUI/AMICO project in mid-January.

University Testbed
After a lively discussion on the AMICO User and Uses lists, it was decided to ask University Testbed participants for input into the 1999-2000 content selection process. It was agreed that their views/requests would not be considered binding on members, but also that it would be valuable to better understand what current users thought a proper balance of new resources would include.

Last modified on  January 11, 2002