As a brand new member of this list, I write to ask for very general
advice.

I'm an historian, but also on half-time assignment for 3 years,
helping colleagues across my university to make better and smarter use
of computers in teaching. Our colleage dean asked me to help the art
historians, who are just facing up to the need to move from slides to
digital images. Two of the (very different) most recommended ways to
go have been ARTstor and M-DID. I've just been touring the M-DID
website and it looks most impressive. I'm particularly interested in
it, because it looks to me as if it might help many disciplines store
and use media we've already got, but organize and access poorly so far.

My first M-DID question concerns what sorts of hardware and tech
support are needed to make the thing work. Right now we're in the last
of the 3 year grant period supporting my efforts, and at the end of it
we'll have our grant-supplied server maybe available to handle part of
the load. We've got a very overloaded although good IT staff, so all
but emergency problem fixes can take a while to get done. The art
folks also have a part-time curator who is willing to learn to use the
new scanners I've helped them get, plus serve as M-DID art history
curator. There are a fair number of amateur but dedicated techies such
as myself willing to handle some tech in our own areas.

Second on M-DID, what catches should I be looking into and why did any
of you who use it adopt it? Are you glad or sorry?

On to ARTstor - I gather our tier 3 university status means it will
cost us about $8000 a year after one-time start up costs of maybe
$15,000 (these figures are from memory so may be a bit off). We'll
definitely still need the ability to organize and store and access a
lot of existing images. If ARTstor is the best way to go, we'll need
to be able to make a VERY strong case to our administration, which
views continuing yearly payments as something to do only in the last
resort (the struggle to go with a Microsoft site license was pretty
epic). If you think ARTstor is best even for medium-at-best university
budgets, how would you help us make that case?

With thanks for any and all advice,

Sara

Sara Tucker
Professor of History
Washburn University
Topeka, Kansas 66621