News Release

Contact: Elyse Topalian

Metropolitan Museum and ARTstor Announce Pioneering Initiative to Provide
Digital Images to Scholars at No Charge

In a new initiative designed to assist scholars with teaching, study, and
the publication of academic works, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will
distribute, free of charge, high-resolution digital images from an expanding
array of works in its renowned collection for use in academic publications.
This new service, which is effective immediately, is available through
ARTstor, a non-profit organization that makes art images available for
educational use.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art has long sought to address the significant
challenges that scholars confront in seeking to secure and license images of
objects from the Museum's collections," stated Metropolitan Museum Director
Philippe de Montebello in making the announcement. "We hope, through this
collaboration, to play a pioneering role in addressing one of the profound
challenges facing scholars in art history, and scholarly publishing, today."

ARTstor's Executive Director, James Shulman, added: "By taking such a bold
step in supporting publications based on art-historical research, the
Metropolitan is providing enormous leadership to the entire sector. Scholars
- in higher education and in museums - have been struggling with the
question of how digitization might help to enable, rather than hinder,
scholarly communications. For all involved, it is obvious that, when faced
with an important directional challenge, the Metropolitan is providing
decisive leadership."

Initially approached by the Metropolitan Museum in 2005 to develop this
initiative, ARTstor has worked in close consultation with Metropolitan
Museum staff to create its new service, entitled "Images for Academic
Publishing" (IAP), which will make images available via software on the
ARTstor Web site (www.artstor.org). Initially, nearly 1,700 images
representative of the broad range of the Metropolitan Museum's encyclopedic
collection will be available through the more than 730 institutions that
currently license ARTstor. Efforts to expand this accessibility are now
underway and will be announced by ARTstor at a later date. For more
information about ARTstor's plans for its "Images for Academic Publishing"
service, please send email to IAPartstor.org

ARTstor, a digital image library, was created in 2001 as a non-profit
initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is now an independent
non-profit organization dedicated to serving education and scholarship in
the arts and humanities. The more than 730 non-profit institutions currently
participating in ARTstor are located in North America, Australia, and the
United Kingdom.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - founded in 1870 with a mission to collect,
preserve, and display works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture
from every part of the globe, and to educate the public about art - is the
most comprehensive art museum in the Western Hemisphere with a collection
now including more than two million works of art.

March 12, 2007

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Communications Department
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198
tel (212) 570-3951 fax (212) 472-2764
communicationsmetmuseum.org