Documents, scientific specimens, works of art and other materials previously available only to a few scholars will be made available worldwide through a new digital imaging program at Cornell.

The Cornell Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC), funded by $2 million in private grants, will make images of these cultural and scientific collections immediately and universally accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem via the World Wide Web. The new institute also will develop tools to help educators use these images and will conduct research on how best to manage the new technology.

"These are spectacular collections that can be used anywhere, while the originals are preserved for future generations," said Thomas Hickerson, director of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, who also will direct the new institute.

The institute will work as a partnership involving faculty, technologists, librarians, archivists and curators from across the campus. It will be administered by the University Library with direction from the university provost and an advisory council.

Early projects will include digital imaging of the holdings of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (over 25,000 objects); operating an indexing system to help users find images in the several visual arts repositories across the campus; participating in efforts to broaden public and research use of Cornell's principal botanical garden, the Cornell Plantations; and assisting in the creation of a website of images of 20th-century dictators, part of an international anthropological study of totalitarianism.

Cornell already has several prototype digital collections available, including "Utopia," a database of images of European Renaissance art; the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL), a three-year collaborative research effort among seven museums and seven universities to share digital images; a collection of Louis Agassiz Fuertes' ornithological artwork; and correspondence and diaries of Ezra Cornell, the university's founder.

Some of these collections began in CD-ROM format and are in the process of being transferred to the World Wide Web. The most recent versions can be reached via . Licensing agreements may limit the availability of some resources to certain academic users.

Digital collections also can combine materials from separate collections held by different departments of the university or even collections in widely different geographical locations, Hickerson said. "Some researchers have traveled to Cornell and viewed the Fuertes artwork at the Laboratory of Ornithology, while others have visited the Johnson Art Museum or the university library," Hickerson said, "but those resources have rarely been used in combination."

One of the primary goals of the CIDC will be to make its materials available for classroom use, both at the K-12 and college levels, Hickerson said. "Education is our mission, and that can include the general public as well as classroom instruction," he added. The Ezra Cornell papers, he noted, were used in a project on New York state history by fourth-grade students at nearby Cayuga Heights Elementary School. "If it's of value to a fourth-grade class at Cayuga Heights, it should be useful for teachers and students statewide," he said.

The CIDC grows out of the Cornell Digital Access Coalition, an effort that gathered momentum over the last five years on minimal funding. Professor Geri Gay, director of Cornell's Interactive Media Group, co-directed the Digital Access Coalition with Hickerson from 1993 to 1996, providing expertise in multimedia design and research.

The new $2 million in funding consists of a lead gift from alumnus Arthur Penn '56, along with a large anonymous donation. In addition, Intel Corp. is donating about $150,000 worth of equipment. Penn will serve on the advisory committee for the new institute. He was formerly a member of the advisory board to the Johnson Art Museum. His daughter, Allison Penn '91, now serves on that board.

"I think to be at the Lewis-and-Clark stage of the discovery of the Web is a good thing," Penn said in explaining his gift. "History doesn't belong to anyone, and the visual material is as important, maybe more important, than the written word."

Penn, who has, with his wife, Marilyn, published four books on the history of photography, noted that large commercial interests have acquired many collections of images and are selling them for profit. While he believes photographers should be compensated for the use of their work, "I felt the not-for-profit site would be a place where the photographer could have his material digitized and stored so that students, academicians and others could study it," he said.

Part of the mission of the CIDC is to study these and other intellectual property issues that arise out of digital imaging and Internet distribution of copyrighted materials and proprietary collections.

"We want to set up a way that educational use can be maintained while benefiting from commercial use," Hickerson explained. "These [university and museum] collections are essentially the cultural heritage of not just North America but of the world. I don't want to see people selling exclusive rights to these collections to commercial vendors, but at the same time I think the institutions have a right to receive some reimbursement for the effort we've put into preservation."

The answer, he said, may lie in some sort of national licensing cooperative. Hickerson is negotiating to create a cooperative project with the University of California at Berkeley to study these issues on behalf of the Museum Digital Licensing Cooperative, an effort associated with the American Association of Museums.

CIDC is not the only Cornell entity digitizing images of the university's holdings. Others include the library's Department of Preservation and Conservation whose "Making of America" project is digitizing 19th-century books and magazines. The Albert R. Mann Library's Core Historical Literature of Agriculture Project is creating an electronic collection of agricultural texts published during 1850-1950. Additionally, digital versions of reserve materials are available to students in Uris Library, and Olin Library's Electronic Text Center offers digital copies of major collections from other institutions around the world.