That's interesting Bill, I wonder how many others are contributing local collections to ARTstor? I guess if image rights are not an issue, there's really no reason not to consider it.
Rachel: We've had ARTstor since before we acquired CONTENTdm. When we first got CONTENTdm, it was actually partly in response to our art departments' dislike of ARTstor. (Based on system problems with Mac-compatibility, and search problems due to inconsistent cataloging.) We kept our ARTstor subscrip, but didn't focus much attention on it while we were promoting our new CDM system - to avoid confusion. Now that our CDM collections are more well established (4 years in), I will usually discuss both with faculty. Though the two resources are quite different in many ways, I try to keep the message simple and just tell them that what's unique about CDM is that the collections are unique and often created to support our curriculum here. ...But that ARTstor has a high volume of images and is a good resource too.
In a way it's sort of funny to me that some of us librarians seem to get hung up on the idea of wanting to provide one-stop-shopping for images, while we don't think anything of subscribing to hundreds of different serials/journal databases. <I'm not saying you're hung up on the idea...but I know that I was a little in the past!>
Anyway, it's a great question, and I'd love to hear others thoughts...
~Joanna