Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO): a user interacts with a rich image database

The Art Museum Image Consortium (www.amico.org) is a not-for-profit organization formed to enable educational use of digital images of works of art and their related documentation. AMICO members contribute high quality, in-house images produced to a specification, to form the AMICO Library. In the 1998-99 academic year, the AMICO Library was made available through the Research Libraries Group to universities and institutions of higher education, in a testbed project. The University of Illinois, with campuses in both Chicago and Urbana-Champaign, successfully competed to become one of seventeen testbed partners. Members of the testbed agreed to provide access to the AMICO Library and track the responses of members of the university community. At the close of this year it is possible to construct a summary of the interactions of constituents of the testbed with the AMICO Library. The presentation will demonstrate the AMICO Library, its functionality, and its rich documentation. The paper focuses not only on one partner's reaction, but attempts to summarize the activities of its colleagues at other institutions.