Mark Dahl

Introduction

accessCeramics¹ is a growing collection of images of contemporary ceramic art created to support arts education. It fills a gap in art image collections on the Web, and uses an innovative user-contributed collection-building model. accessCeramics is an example of an online academic resource whose costs are borne largely by its sponsoring institution but whose benefits are enjoyed by a much broader community. The resource benefits its sponsoring institution through its educational value to students, through the professional development opportunities that it provides for faculty and staff, and by enhancing institutional visibility and prestige. The educational, research and artistic value that it provides to the wider community comes at a low marginal cost to its sponsoring institution. But its sponsoring institution might consider a range of business models that would allow it to capture some of the value it provides to the wider community. These models include: collaborations, subscriptions, sponsorships, donations, endowment, advertising and fundraising through a related business venture.

Background

Created in 2008 by the Watzek Library and the Department of Art at Lewis & Clark College, accessCeramics is an innovative online collection of contemporary ceramic art images. Designed to support arts education, accessCeramics fills a gap in artistic image collections on the Web by providing high-quality images of contemporary ceramic art suitable for an instructional environment. Since its inception, accessCeramics has grown to 4,852 images representing 352 artists from six continents. Visitors to the site increased 46 per cent in 2009–10, 50 per cent in 2010–11 and 44 per cent in 2011–12, which saw a total of 76,205 site visits from 124 countries.

accessCeramics uses a collaborative collection-building model in which artists submit and catalogue their own work using the social photo sharing software Flickr.² A five-member curatorial board solicits and reviews artists’ submissions based on quality of work, professional status and contribution to the field. The accessCeramics model, which has drawn international attention, provides opportunities for learning, inspiration and easy access to contemporary ceramic arts images to a global audience.

Lewis & Clark College,³ a small, selective, private liberal arts college that enrolls approximately 2,000 undergraduates, hosts the project. accessCeramics is a collaboration between librarians and an art faculty member at the College. The librarians handle the logistics of the project, including the development of the website, management of collection metadata, grant writing and other logistical support. Ted Vogel, Associate Professor of Art and Programme Head of Ceramics at Lewis & Clark, heads the curatorial board and sets the broad direction of the project. Together, Vogel and library staff members make up the accessCeramics team.

Costs

accessCeramics has been a front-loaded project with its largest cost consistently being staff time of team members at the project’s host institution, Lewis & Clark. In early 2008, the accessCeramics team spent considerable hours conceiving the project’s idea and scope, creating a prototype website and seeding it with an initial collection. In the 2008–9 academic year, the project team redesigned the website, recruited initial artist participants, and marketed the project with support from a grant from the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education.⁴ With a website and a submissions system in place, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts⁵ for the 2009–10 academic year provided funds for a submissions coordinator who recruited prospective artists and assisted the curatorial board with voting. Following the end of grant support in June 2010, the project team reconfigured the project to be less labour-intensive by putting in place an automated voting system for artist review by the curatorial board. During the 2010–11 academic year the accessCeramics team moved the project into more of a maintenance mode with staff time only devoted to occasional fixes and adjustments. This less time-intensive state proved successful as the size of the collection and its use continued to grow during the period.

Staff working on the project spend time on grant writing, software development, metadata management, marketing, workflow design and coordination of submissions. The College’s sponsored research officer has also contributed a significant amount of time to grant writing for the project. Other costs associated with running the site are minor or incidental. The project runs on a server that is already a sunk cost for the College and utilises a Flickr Pro account that costs $25 per year. One could argue that the project distributes many of what would be costs in a traditional library digital project or art publication to participating artists. The artists in accessCeramics must bear the cost of photographing their work and are responsible for uploading and cataloguing the images that populate the collection. In summer of 2011, the project team submitted a second grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts that would support institutional collaborations. Under the proposed project, arts institutions such as the American Museum of Contemporary Craft will contribute their own collections and take part in artist recruitment and training for accessCeramics, thus bearing some of the costs of expanding the collection. The proposal was not funded, however.

Benefits

The accessCeramics project benefits its host institution in a few different ways. Chiefly, it provides educational resources for Lewis & Clark’s studio art programme that would not otherwise be available. Students in ceramics courses consult accessCeramics on a regular basis as they study the work of other artists and develop ideas for their own work. Student employees supporting the project have had the opportunity to learn more about classification of art and to develop relationships with artists. In these ways, accessCeramics contributes directly to the educational mission of Watzek Library and the broader College of Arts and Sciences at Lewis & Clark, which the library supports. Lewis & Clark College supports professional development for its faculty and accessCeramics provides an aspect of this for its curator, Ted Vogel. accessCeramics builds connections between Vogel and fellow ceramicists and this enhances his own creative work. Furthermore, Vogel’s curation of the accessCeramics collection is an intellectual and creative endeavour in its own right.

Among the library staff, accessCeramics has served to inspire and influence other digital projects. The digital services coordinator has modified and re-used the underlying software for a couple of other projects, including Oregon Poetic Voices, which collects recorded poetry in a similarly distributed way. The project has provided the visual resources coordinator with an opportunity to develop a new approach to visual resources collection building, which she has shared widely among colleagues and applied to at least one other project. Overall, the project has honed the library’s capacity to manage compelling academic digital projects and secure funding for them.

Economists have argued that non-profit colleges and universities are motivated to maximise institutional prestige (James, 1990). A prestigious institution is able to attract high-quality faculty and students and accrue more financial resources, all of which contribute to its educational mission. The academic library literature identifies special collections and grants as ways that academic libraries can contribute to institutional prestige and reputation (Oakleaf, 2010). Indeed, accessCeramics could be considered a special collection of Watzek Library. The high artistic quality of the artwork represented in accessCeramics and its global reach serve to increase the visibility and prestige of Lewis & Clark. Beyond their nominal value, grants in support of accessCeramics draw attention to Lewis & Clark’s academic excellence, especially that of its art programme.

Alignment of benefits and costs

Given these costs and benefits, the question arises as to whether the accessCeramics project is a worthwhile endeavour for its host institution, Lewis & Clark College. Because the collection is supported primarily by the library, whose mission is to support the academic activities of the College with resources and services, one way to gauge this is to determine whether or not accessCeramics provides educational benefits in proportion to other expenditures on resources and services made by the library.

During its first two academic years of existence, it is hard to make the case that the benefits that accessCeramics provided to Lewis & Clark students as an educational resource were anywhere close to the costs of the project. During those two years, the collection was small and growing and the web interface was immature. Usage by Lewis & Clark students was light, with an estimated 99 visits in the first year and 407 visits in the second year. Even with grant support for assistance with web design and the submissions coordinator position, three library staff members devoted approximately ten percent of their College-funded work time to the project during this time.

The year 2011/12 might be described as accessCeramics’ first production year. The collection had reached a critical mass of almost 4,000 images and 200 artists and the procedures and systems for maintaining and growing the collection were basically in place. During that year, the project cost approximately $5,280 (0.08 full-time equivalent (FTE)) in library staff time and $2,751 (0.03 FTE) in faculty time for a total cost of $8,031. Over that time, there were approximately 1,056 visits to the site by Lewis & Clark students. When accessCeramics is viewed as a benefit only to this population, each visit to the site by a student cost approximately $7.60, a cost almost five times higher than the $1.60 cost of a visit to ARTstor,⁶ an academic image database to which Watzek Library subscribes. By another measure, if one compares visits to the accessCeramics site with access to full-text articles provided by a popular science journal vendor at $15.40 each, the accessCeramics costs look more moderate. When the project is viewed in terms of its aggregate usage (at Lewis & Clark and beyond), the cost of each of the 53,909 visits in the 2010–11 academic year drops to $14/visit.

Clearly, to make the case that accessCeramics is cost-effective for its host institution, more factors need to be brought to bear than its direct educational benefits to Lewis & Clark students. This is especially the case in its initial start-up years, when the project brought fairly minimal benefits to the educational mission of the College. A 2008 report by Ithaka on approaches to sustaining online academic resources identifies one category of revenue model as a situation where the host institution, as an indirect beneficiary, supports the project. The report notes that this is a common approach and that it works best when the resource is key to the reputation or mission of the institution. The report identifies several indirect benefits that are applicable to the accessCeramics project including reputation enhancement, the creation of ‘skills, expertise and opportunities that are valuable elsewhere in the organization’ and the establishment of models of collaboration (Maron et al., 2008).

The professional development benefits of accessCeramics to its team members and faculty leader were clearly high during the start-up phase of the project, which was a creative period during which new models and systems were developed. This was also a period when grant support was the highest, offsetting at least some of the start-up costs. accessCeramics’ contribution to the College’s global profile is clearly another benefit of the project. This benefit was high during the start-up phase as the project won publicly visible grants and as the team publicised the project at professional conferences in the art, library and visual resources fields. As the project’s base of artists and art images has grown, its popularity and influence within the artistic community has increased and the overall success of the project continues to raise the College’s global profile. While in production mode the accessCeramics project can stand on its own as a somewhat expensive and specialised educational resource for Lewis & Clark students. But to justify its startup costs one must invoke some of the indirect benefits that are harder to quantify: professional development of faculty and staff, its value as a model for other projects and greater visibility and prestige for the host institution.

Revenue models

To make accessCeramics more sustainable and cost-effective, it is worth considering ways that the project could bring in further revenue to offset its costs. With nearly 54,000 visits to the site last academic year, clearly accessCeramics is of tremendous utility to populations beyond Lewis & Clark. There may be some potential to monetise that utility. The Ithaka report notes that subscription-based models are common for many online academic resources, particularly online journals (Maron et al., 2008). The accessCeramics team has shied away from any such models chiefly because the growth and the usefulness of the resource hinges on broad open access. To recruit more artists for the project the site must be as visible and accessible on the Web as possible. Much of the activity on the contemporary Internet depends on the ability to freely link to content, and many businesses distributing information on the Internet, including news organisations, operate under a model in which all or at least some of their content is available for free for these reasons (Anderson, 2008).

A variant on the subscription-based model could be a ‘freemium’ approach, common among Internet content businesses in which basic access to the site is free but a fee is required to access certain content such as high-resolution images. The basic problem with even this limited approach to the subscription model is that it would hinder accessCeramics’ mission of broad educational use. Furthermore, given accessCeramics’ current size, it is questionable whether it has a critical mass of content to warrant packaging it and charging for it. Another variation on the subscription idea could be an institutional membership model, where arts and educational organisations pay a membership fee and in return have acknowledgement on the website and some say in the direction of the project. The arXiv.org⁷ project is currently pursuing a similar model (Rieger and Warner, 2010). As arts and educational organisations with the most potential interest in accessCeramics have limited financial resources, however, securing any amount of significance through these means might be prohibitive.

The Ithaka report cites an endowment as a means of having indirect beneficiaries support the project over the long term. This concept is attractive, but it would require raising a large amount of capital, a significant obstacle in a college fundraising environment where there are many priorities more directly associated with the institution’s core mission. It is possible that a gift targeted at the accessCeramics project could support a small revenue stream for the project (Maron et al., 2008).

Online advertising is a common revenue-generation strategy for online media, though it is almost non-existent in the world of online academic resources. The accessCeramics team has discussed the possibility and come down against having search adverts or display advertising embedded in the main content of the site as this would compromise its educational feel. The team has discussed the idea of corporate sponsorship in which affiliated businesses or institutions would make an annual pledge to accessCeramics in exchange for a visible acknowledgement on the site similar to public television in the United States. accessCeramics provides visibility to artists who may be actively selling their artwork, and there may be a possibility of monetising this value. A variation on the advertising model would be the development of an online art store that uses the accessCeramics name and is linked from accessCeramics. The accessCeramics group could contract someone to set up an online store using Etsy⁸ or a similar sales platform to sell artwork from accessCeramics artists, dividing the revenues between the artists, the store contractor and the accessCeramics project. This would appear to be an attractive option that merits further scrutiny, especially as accessCeramics grows larger. The viability of this approach would depend highly on artists’ willingness to participate, sales volume and the overall administrative costs. This model is probably not widely applicable to other academic digital projects as most do not contain content that is a surrogate of items for sale so in that sense it may be a unique opportunity.

Contingencies for the future

With a growing collection and user base, a strong faculty sponsor, a vibrant ceramics programme and a library committed to digital projects and visual resources, accessCeramics has a secure home at Lewis & Clark for the foreseeable future. As already noted, the accessCeramics team has a plan to grow and expand the collection in collaboration with partner institutions. But what if this constellation of circumstances should change? What if a new, more compelling destination for contemporary ceramic art emerges on the Web? What if the library changes focus away from digital initiatives or the faculty leader moves to another institution?

One possible future for accessCeramics could be migration to a new home where the collection would continue to grow and evolve. At some point, the accessCeramics team might find that the project would be better carried forward by another organisation such as one that supports a larger artistic digital collection. Merging and absorption of various online enterprises is normal in the business world and certainly could make sense in this non-profit endeavour. Another future scenario could be to wind down the growth of the project and move it into a read-only mode. It would be a fairly inexpensive prospect to continue to make the images and metadata of the project available online at some level if the current highly customised site was not sustainable. The content could be hosted on Flickr, a larger-scale art image collection such as ARTstor or through a generic digital collections platform at Lewis & Clark. In any event, preserving the artistic content of the project into the future should be possible at minimal expense.

Lessons learned

As reflected by continued growth in artist participation and usage, accessCeramics fills a global gap in artistic image collections on the Web. Identifying this gap was possible through the initial insights of the accessCeramics founders at the inception of the project. Any digital project should undertake a careful assessment of the potential needs that it will fulfil before beginning. The project has demonstrated a tremendous synergy between a faculty member and an academic library. It has fused a faculty member’s expertise in the art world with the library’s competencies in digital technologies and visual resources. This relationship has resulted in an excellent end product and has also strengthened the faculty leader’s connections in the art world, increased the library’s capacity for digital projects and developed a model for faculty-library collaboration that can be exploited in other contexts. Though this project was labour-intensive in its initial stages, it was really a breakthrough in terms of what is possible in the area of faculty-library collaboration.

In the context of Watzek Library, the project might be termed a flagship digital project, one that sets an example for success and whose indirect benefits exceed its direct benefits. Having one or two such projects is certainly possible given Watzek Library’s capacity, but having several is clearly cost-prohibitive. Watzek Library is building on accessCeramics by developing smaller-scale digital projects that are more directly targeted at supporting the educational mission of Lewis & Clark rather than serving a larger audience. These projects have attracted positive attention to the library (Meyer and Sykes, 2010). An example of this is the Spiders of Lewis & Clark project⁹ for which introductory biology students captured samples of spider species in the area and developed a web resource that documents and classifies the spider species collected. Other examples include projects connected to Lewis & Clark’s off-campus programmes, including one in which students documented graffiti art in New York City¹⁰ and another (currently in progress) in which students studying in India document architecture, monuments and daily life.

accessCeramics’ broad impact on an external community may be an exception among digital projects supported by Watzek Library, but that impact has excited and invigorated those that work on the project. The accessCeramics team is extremely gratified when it looks at a map that displays the growing global audience for the site. accessCeramics’ success has inspired library staff to take a more ambitious approach to digital initiatives and this approach is paying off in projects beyond accessCeramics.

References