The Clark Art Institute colloquium on “The Portals of Art History” brought together a diverse group of individuals for two days of stimulating conversation. The group included practicing art historians, editors, and library and museum professionals, all actively engaged in various ways with the development and deployment of online resources for the history of art.

More than most disciplines, art historical praxis embraces both individuals working within institutional settings - universities and art museums as well as research institutes and professional organizations of various kinds - and independent scholars. The group that convened in Williamstown similarly included individuals representing important institutional digital initiatives as well as individuals who are developing online resources either independently of institutional support or in the context of online communities defined less by traditional institutional or organizational structures than by shared or overlapping art historical interests. And of course one of the most compelling and promising aspects of the web - and still more of “web 2.0” - is precisely that it allows and even encourages such communities of interest to flourish in a way that traditional organizational structures - and traditional means of communication and publication - could not readily do.

As suggested, among those participating in the colloquium were representatives of online initiatives and resources hosted or sponsored by institutions. These include: Grove Art Online, the electronic art encyclopedia produced by the online publishing division of Oxford University Press, the point of departure for which was the standard 34-volume Dictionary of Art; the Timeline of Art History , a pedagogical resource developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s educational division; and ARTstor, a digital library of more than half a million images developed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a philanthropy with a long history of support for the art museum and university worlds. All three of these mission-driven, not-for-profit online resources seek to support teaching and learning as well as research and scholarship, and all three are actively used at hundreds or even thousands of institutions around the world and by tens of thousands of scholars, teachers and students. Such online projects represent efforts to create digital resources that offer the same kind of value that art history has always derived from such indispensable “analog” resources as art reference works, photographic archives, and slide libraries. At the same, while they are modeled upon such traditional information resources, they should not be seen as simple replications of conventional information resources in a new medium; rather, they also seek to take advantage of the new media to offer what cannot easily be offered “offfline” - above all, enhanced access in the form of ubiquitous, 24x7 availability, but also various forms of interactivity that are only feasible with online resources.

The digital era has also seen the emergence of new kinds of organizations that seek to advance the development of the digital humanities, some by making contributions that neither established institutions nor unaffiliated individuals are well-placed to make, others seeking to develop services that would otherwise need to be developed redundantly by countless institutions. Among these is the Council on Library and Information Resources which, together with its affiliated Digital Library Federation seeks to play just such a role within the domain of higher education and academic and research libraries, and which was represented at the colloquium.

The digital revolution has already created new opportunities for new forms of individual engagement with art history, and especially for the engagement of the independent scholar unaffiliated with established institutions. Art history, of course, has always had its institutional “outsiders” - one thinks above all, perhaps, of Aby Warburg, the maverick art historian whose impact on the field was proportionate to - and perhaps due in some measure to - his own lifelong independence from its principal institutions. That Warburg was able to sustain this independence is due in large part to the fact that he was independently wealthy. Today, thanks to the web, the opportunity exists for the unaffiliated individual who is not independently wealthy but simply independent, to play an active role in the history of art. At the same time, the web provides an unprecedented opportunity for individuals with shared interests to coalesce into online communities of interest - with new publication venues at their disposal in the form of web sites and web-based online journals. At the Clark colloquium we enjoyed the company of five such individuals, representing respectively the online journals LatinArt.com, n. paradoxa, an international feminist art journal, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, La Tribune de l’Art, and the very Observatoire Critique des ressources numériques en histoire de l’art et archéologie in which these words appear. We were also joined by individual practitioners who, working within traditional academic settings, are seeking to leverage the possibilities of the web both to enhance their own teaching and to help “organize the chaos” - in Nietzsche’s memorable phrase - by managing directories of web sites of interest to the community of art historians. Communities of interest depend increasingly upon electronic discussion groups, of which the field of art history offers several. One of the most highly-regarded and effective - the ArtHist Archive, part of the enormous family of H-Net listservs hosted by the University of Michigan but edited by volunteer subject specialists around the world - was represented at the Clark colloquium. Countless art history practitioners look to the archive for timely news about conferences, job vacancies, book and exhibition reviews, etc.

One of the greater challenges facing all of the initiatives represented at the colloquium is sustainability. The Internet - and still more the Internet Archive - is littered with defunct web resources. In a poignant presentation a few years ago at the annual CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) conference, a colleague gave a moving obituary of just such “might have been” sites in the history of art. In grappling with the challenge of sustainability, those present at the Clark colloquium described a range of - to use a blunt term for a serious challenge that should be discussed candidly - “business models,” all representing attempts to ensure the long-term viability of their efforts. Some of the resources we explored are made available - on a non-profit basis - via subscription, with academic and research libraries as the primary licensee. Some depend upon grant support or support from host institutions. Some sell advertising. The discussion of these approaches to sustainability was a lively if inconclusive one, touching from various angles on the tension between open access as an ideal and the realities of seeking to sustain a valuable but costly enterprise.

The Clark colloquium itself was as stimulating as it was, inevitably, inconclusive. This would seem to reflect the fact that the “portals of art history” are just beginning to open, and that none of us is at all certain what lies on the other side.

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