The Museum Educational Site Licensing (MESL) Project was a collaboration of seven collecting institutions and seven universities, defining the terms and conditions for the educational use of digitized museum images and related information. MESL provided access to over 4,500 images of paintings, photos, textiles, ceremonial objects, and other cultural artifacts through a collaborative effort of the Getty Information Institute, the Eastman House, the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums, three other museums, the U.S. Library of Congress, and seven universities. This cooperative venture has demonstrated how information and images from various sites could be disseminated nationally over electronic networks.
From the start of the MESL program in July 1995, Cornell University was an active participant in MESL. The Pilot Phase of the MESL project expired July 1, 1998. Cornell then negotiated permission with 6 of the original 7 museums to retain access to their images for an additional year, with only Harvard unwilling to participate. This additional year expired on July 1, 1999. Although the project is over, pages related to the project are still available at the MESL demo site. During the course of the MESL project, a number of courses at Cornell made use of the MESL images. Two examples of course use of MESL images, both from the Department of History of Art, Cornell University, are available at the MESL Archive Site.