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ART CART Added to Academic Commons @ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship

Columbia Libraries/Information Services’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship is pleased to announce the addition of the ART CART: Saving the Legacy project to Columbia’s institutional repository Academic Commons. ART CART is an intergenerational arts legacy project that connects aging professional artists with teams of graduate students to document and archive their creative work. Art works and oral histories from twenty-five New York City and Washington DC-based artists can now be found in the ART CART collection in Academic Commons.

The addition of the ART CART collection to Academic Commons provides researchers, scholars, artists, private collectors, and the general public with free, unrestricted access to the works of these twenty-five living artists, who are aged between 63 and 101 years old. Their media include drawing, painting, quilting, installation art, photography, and sculpture.

Academic Commons is Columbia University’s digital repository where faculty, students, and staff of Columbia and its affiliate institutions can deposit the results of their scholarly work and research. Content in Academic Commons is freely available to the public, and now contains more than 12,000 items of research.

The ART CART project began at the Research Center for Arts and Culture (RCAC) at Teachers College in 2010, which relocated to the National Center for Creative Aging in Washington DC in 2011 to take the project to a national platform. In New York City, student fellows from Columbia’s Programs in Occupational Therapy and the School of Social Work worked on the project with students fromNew York University, the Pratt Institute, and The New School. In Washington DC, student fromAmerican and Howard Universities and the Corcoran College of Art + Design partnered in a community-based project model that included The Phillips Collection and IONA Senior Services.

Joan Jeffri, founder of the RCAC and ART CART, said: “Having the ART CART collection live in Academic Commons enables us to spread the word about living artists in a meaningful and thoroughly documented way. For the artists, it provides a place of pride in this institutional repository in which they can keep a lasting record of their work.”

Marilee Shapiro, a contributing artist to ART CART at 101 years old, said: “I am very grateful to be in this great program. Every old artist’s anguish is what to do with one’s body of work. Destroy, abandon it to its fate? Along came ART CART to the rescue.”

Rebecca Kennison, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship Director, commented: “The addition of the ART CART collection to Academic Commons is in keeping with our aim to house a diverse, vibrant range of research items in Columbia’s digital repository. We are excited to make this important art legacy project openly available to all who wish to access it.”

The ART CART collection will continue to be updated with new works by the current twenty-five artists as well as by artists new to the project. It can be found in Academic Commons at http://bit.ly/ARTCART.

The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) works to increase the utility and impact of research produced at Columbia by creating, adapting, implementing, supporting, and sustaining innovative digital tools and publishing platforms for content delivery, discovery, analysis, data curation, and preservation. The Center engages in extensive outreach, education, and advocacy to ensure that the scholarly work produced at Columbia University has a global reach and accelerates the pace of research across disciplines. CDRS is one of six entities that comprise the Digital Programs and Technology Services branch of Columbia University Libraries/Information Services.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is one of the top five academic research library systems in North America. The collections include over 11 million volumes, over 150,000 journals and serials, as well as extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps, and graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are organized into 22 libraries and various academic technology centers. The Libraries employs more than 500 professional and support staff. The website of the Libraries is the gateway to its services and resources:library.columbia.edu.

The Research Center for Arts and Culture (RCAC) provides data and ideas for applied research, education, advocacy, policy making, and action. Its seminal research, ABOVE GROUND, was the foundation for the ART CART project. Both are founded and run by Joan Jeffri.

The National Center for Creative Aging is the auspice for the Research Center for Arts and Culture. The national clearinghouse at the nexus of creativity and aging, it is dedicated to fostering an understanding of the vital relationship between creative expression and quality of life for older adults.

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