Can museums and libraries profit from sharing their information, visual or textual? Is direct access to digital archives a more logical or economic way to develop access to images for teaching and research than assembling local collections? Recent digital image library projects in the United States, and their impact on the teaching practices of art and architectural historians, show the advantages of focusing on issues such as licensing and intellectual property, metadata and evolving cataloging practice, image quality, and the different costs of creation and delivery. But there are other potential benefits such as document delivery and the dissemination of archival information, as well as the preservation of fragile illustrated texts through digital imaging.
