The Met funnels all profits, 10-12 percent from these revenues, into its operating budget. Electronic publishing has promised to expand this business. Museum staffs have hoped that as the trend to use images continues to be facilitated by new technologies, they will find new markets for their images and thereby generate more money. People love images, and computers offer a flexible medium for the display of images that, at a relatively low cost, can be digitized and transported anywhere. CD-ROMs full of art images have proliferated.
Websites sponsored by art museums are also immensely popular.
Not all websites have retail outlets associated with them, but it is reasonable to assume that those that do have realized some revenues, although probably not enough to make the site self-supporting. The promise of electronic publishing has also produced anxiety within museums about losing control over their images, which constitutes the second reason art museums are interested in supplying data and images to the Image Directory. Because digitized images are so easy to copy and to disfigure, museums have not been able to ensure that copies are as true as possible to the originals, a guarantee that book and journal production methods are more capable of making. Museum staff worry about digitized images that are cropped, that are discolored, and that are corrupted in any number of ways being distributed under their names. They worry that people use digital images without paying the museum for the right to use them.