The fourteen participating institutions, seven museums and seven universities, are collaborating in good faith for the purpose of promoting and developing widespread public access to shared cultural documentation. The project will explore issues of capture, storage, distribution,use, and evaluation of museum information.
Goals are to establish mutually beneficial protocols for the licensing of such information.
The seven universities involved in the MESL project are the American University, Cornell, Columbia, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the University of Virginia. Participating museums are the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard Art Museums, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, and the Library of Congress. The American University's involvement in the MESL project stemmed from my work as the visual resources coordinator in the department of art. An increasing number of image users from across the campus made it clear to me that the visual image is becoming the basis of a new and exciting multimedia approach to teaching. At American University the existing fiber optic network provides the infrastructure to deliver museum data on campus.