"Colleagues,
I wondered if anyone has dealt with (or thought about) a recent Christie's
auction catalog development that we are trying to decide how to handle?"
+++
This has been a problem for us as well since we also tip the prices lists
into our catalogs. During the recent ARLIS Conference the problems
associated this change in Christie's policy were raised at the SCIPIO Users
Group Meeting. There was some discussion regarding the possibility of
archiving the price lists through RLG. However, in the meantime we still
need to obtain the lists in a useable format. Although some catalogs
include the price lists of previous sales, not all Christie's price lists
are published in the later catalogs, so this is also not a dependable
method for acquiring price results.
At the time of the conference, Christie's was only offering price lists on
the Web site for the most recent three months. Since then they have
extended the availability to cover the past year. They have also added the
option of a printer-friendly version to the page. Here the price list may
be copied and pasted using Microsoft Excel, but the result of this is one
long column and reformatting the data is time consuming.
With regard to Sotheby's, they have continued to send all of their price
lists to us by mail. The price results in the Sotheby's web version have
not been 100% accurate, although it seems to be improving. Today we only
found one list with incomplete data.
Kay Downey.
Kay Downey, Serials Librarian
Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Blvd.
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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