COLLABORATIVE AGREEMENT REACHED BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, THE
AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR SOUTHERN ASIAN ART (ACSAA), AND ARTSTOR

The University of Michigan, the American Council for Southern Asian Art
(ACSAA), and ARTstor Inc. announced today that they had reached an agreement
whereby the University of Michigan and ARTstor will collaborate on the
distribution through ARTstor of approximately 13,000 high quality digital
images from the University of Michigan slide distribution service's "ACSAA
Color Slide Project." Spanning nearly 3,000 years of Southern Asian
culture, the ACSAA Color Slide Project has been the primary source of
teaching images in the field of Southern Asian art and architecture for
thirty years.

The ACSAA Color Slide Project is a non-profit supplier of photographic
materials of Southern Asian art. Since 1974, the Project has provided high
quality yet modestly priced color slides of the art and architecture of
India and other South and Southeast Asian countries (Nepal, Tibet, Burma,
Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan) to
individuals and institutions for teaching and research purposes around the
world.

This collaboration will make this rich body of visual material and related
scholarship available online and at high resolution for the first time. The
audience for these materials will include not only art historians but also
scholars, teachers, and students throughout the humanities and social
sciences, who will value having the ability to access, browse, and make rich
educational and scholarly uses of this unique corpus of images. Through
this agreement, the University of Michigan expects to make sets of the
digital images available to individual scholars, here and abroad, as it has
always done with its slide sets.

In reaching this agreement, Alex Potts, Professor and Chair of the History
of Art Department at the University of Michigan, and Mary Beth Heston,
President of ACSAA and Chair of the Art History Department at the College of
Charleston, expressed their enthusiasm in collaborating with ARTstor and in
using digital technologies to make this important scholarly resource more
broadly available for noncommercial pedagogical and scholarly purposes. "The
History of Art Department at Michigan is very glad to be working with
ARTstor in making a significant portion of the exceptionally rich visual
archive of Asian material it administers more widely available to students
and researchers in the field. Collaborating with the American Council for
Southern Asian Art to bring the holdings of the ACSAA Color Slide Project to
a wider audience is important for the educational mission of both our
institutions," said Professor Potts, expressing the University of Michigan's
enthusiasm for this collaboration. "ACSAA believes ARTstor shares the
original educational and scholarly objectives of ACSAA in assembling and
distributing these images. ARTstor will further our mission to provide an
important resource for scholars, teachers and students by bringing this
resource into the digital age," Professor Heston adds on behalf of ACSAA.
Max Marmor, ARTstor's Director of Collection Development, expressed
ARTstor's keen interest in this partnership. "The ACSAA slides have been
one of the key sources of teaching images in Asian art and architecture for
decades. Making these very important images available to teachers and
scholars in digital form through ARTstor will significantly ease the
transition to digital for hosts of teachers and students, while also adding
a new dimension to the immensely important slide distribution projects at
the University of Michigan and strengthening ACSAA's key role in support of
the study of Southern Asian Art."

The ACSAA Color Slide Project is a not-for-profit service established by the
American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) at the University of
Michigan in the mid-1970s. Since then the ACSAA Color Slide Project has
functioned as a service to the educational community. The Project, which
has benefited from the contributions of many individual photographers,
concentrates on photographing and distributing, at an affordable price,
slides of art objects from exhibitions, distinguished private collections,
and the permanent collections of major American and South Asian museums. The
project also photographs and distributes slides of major architectural sites
that include sculptural monuments. For more information on the Project, see
its website at
<http://www.umich.edu/~hartspc/acsaa/acsaa.html>.

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) is a non-profit
organization dedicated to advancing the study and awareness of the art of
South and Southeast Asia. In addition to periodic symposia, ACSAA pursues
these goals through various projects, including its bi-annual newsletter,
bibliographies, and of course the ACSAA Color Slide Project. Since its
incorporation in 1967, ACSAA has grown from its original fifteen members to
an organization of some three hundred individuals and institutions. For
more information on ACSAA see the organizational website at
<http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/acsaa/hp.html>.

ARTstor was created in 2001 as a nonprofit initiative of The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, and is now an independent non-profit organization
dedicated to serving education and scholarship in the arts and the
humanities through the utilization of digital technologies. Currently, more
than 335 nonprofit institutions in the United States are participating in
ARTstor, and ARTstor anticipates making its library of digital images
available to nonprofit institutions outside of the United States as well.
For more information on ARTstor, see the ARTstor website at
<www.artstor.org>.