Dear ARLIS colleagues,

 

A Future of Art Bibliography (FAB) (http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/development_collaborations/fab/) annual session has been a mainstay at each annual ARLIS conference for the past six years.  The broader focus of this year's ARLIS/VRA meeting seems an appropriate moment for us to acknowledge that the kinds of projects that were so important to encourage, facilitate, and champion under the FAB umbrella a half decade ago now permeate our landscape in a variety of forms. The underlying FAB tenets espousing international collaboration with the goal of providing access to the "bibliography" of art history in its broadest sense--from traditional print publications to born-digital content-- are now featured among the Society's Strategic Directions.   

 

Therefore, in lieu of a seventh FAB update session this year, we are providing a virtual update of the various projects that we've been following and reporting on over the years.

 

1. Bibliographic records and indices:

 

The Art Discovery Group Catalogue (http://artdiscovery.net) continues to bring together a universe of art libraries to provide a discipline-specific discovery tool through the OCLC Worldcat platform.  The past year focused on adding a variety of important international art libraries to OCLC and Art Discovery, thanks to a generous grant from the Kress Foundation that was facilitated by the Getty Research Institute.  A further recent development is the addition of SCIPIO fields to the search interface, something that is available only via the Art Discovery platform.  The development team is continuing its research on a method to improve the simultaneous searching of stand-alone art libraries and those housed within major university libraries.  

 

Learn more about the Art Discovery Group Catalogue at the OCLC sessions this year— the Research Libraries Partner lunch on Friday, March 11, or the OCLC update session on Wednesday March 9, 5:30-6:30 in the Grand Crescent Room (http://sched.co/5bZ). 

100 years of art bibliography: The joint collaboration of the French INIST/CNRS, the Institut nationale d'histoire de l'art (INHA), and the Getty Research Institute to unite the data from legacy RAA, RILA, and BHA databases currently hosted separately at INIST, INHA, and the Getty is underway.  When complete, plans are to release the data in a freely available single unified search platform, as well as to allow the data in the aggregate to be utilized among various discovery tools.

 

2. Digitized Content:

 

The Getty Research Portal (portal.getty.edu) now provides access to over 85,000 digitized art history texts in nearly 100,000 volumes, including those from the most recent new contributor, the Warburg Institute. Since last July, a four-year Portal expansion project enables several enhancements, including significantly increasing both the depth and breadth of the digitized texts available on the Portal, completing the long-anticipated upgrade to the Portal’s back end and user interface, developing a more strategic approach to shaping the Portal’s collective collection, formalizing  an outreach campaign aimed at increasing both audience and contributors, and initiating a collaborative digitization project between the GRI and Heidelberg University Library. 

 

Learn more and ask questions at the informal Getty Research Portal Advisory Group open meeting: Friday, March 11th, 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in the Baker Room at the Westin (http://sched.co/4Ymx).

 

The Digital Cicognara Library project:  (www.cicognara.org) has coalesced over the past year thanks to a Kress grant to Heidelberg University that provided the means to systematically assess the Cicognara holdings among the initial partner libraries.  An exemplar among collaborative digital projects, DCL  partners are actively contributing staff time and expertise to ensure significant and timely progress.  Princeton University is now taking the lead in coordinating and hosting the project, which should offer instructive lessons for cooperative digitization of an entire bibliography and provide an excellent focused and cohesive testbed for technological advances in discovery, comparison, and digital art history.  The project will also contribute the metadata for discovery within the broader context of the Getty Research Portal. 

 

Learn more about the project as an observer at the project meeting: Wednesday, March 9^th, 7:30-9:00 am in the Baker Room (http://sched.co/5ZYV).

 

 

3. Born-Digital publications:

 

Web-Archiving:  We have continued to track several major web-archiving initiatives including the Mellon-funded NYARC Web-Archiving grant “Reframing Collections for the Digital Age” and the IviesPlus Art & Architecture Group CAUSEWAY Project supported by Columbia University Libraries, both projects explored the complexities of capturing art and architecture websites, and worked to build a collaborative collection development protocol for such work. Building on the exciting work already accomplished through these projects and others, as well as the work still envisioned among various ARLIS members can now be addressed and coordinated in the new Web Archiving SIG  (https://arlisna.org/organization/sigs), chaired this year by web archiving staff at the Frick and the Internet Archive.  Goals for the SIG are to ".. steward the community of art librarians currently engaged or interested in collecting, preserving, and providing access to born-digital resources native to the World Wide Web. It will monitor and report on trends, standards, and services in order to facilitate resource sharing and the technical development of web archiving tools of especial value to art libraries and museums."

 

Attend the Web Archiving SIG on Wednesday March 9, 2016 5:30pm - 6:30pm

Orcas Room at the Seattle Westin

 

Digital Publications sessions

We’ve continued to monitor the emergence of born-digital publications in art and architecture, contemplating when we will reach a ‘tipping point’ toward greater availability of content in electronic formats. We find however, that the production of e-publications is still in its infancy and is largely characterized by a profusion of experimental platforms for presentation and dissemination – many of these produced by museum publication departments. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library conducted an ARLIS/NA sponsored survey that sampled museum publication departments in an effort to understand current and projected trends. The results of the survey will be presented at anARLIS/NA-VRA Joint Conference session. In addition to presenting the survey results, the session will bring together representatives from multiple sectors of our community engaged in publishing, producing and acquiring art e-publications to encourage a natural connection between creators, consumers and stewards of these materials.  

Attend the session: “E-mania! — the present and future of electronic art book publishing” on Thursday, March 10, 11:00 am-12:30 pm, Fifth Avenue Room (http://sched.co/4Nzl).  (Please note this session will also be recorded and available on the ARLIS/NA Learning Portal following the conference.)

 

In closing, we'd like to point to the ARLIS/NA Strategic Direction on Collections and Access:

The Society shall seek opportunities for collaboration across institutions and cultural organizations to promote the informed management, preservation, discovery, and access to collections amid their evolving publishing manifestations.

This Strategic Direction pointedly underscores the genesis and ongoing  reason for the longevity of the overarching Future of Art Bibliography initiative.

 

We hope that FAB's principles will continue to serve you well.

 

 

Carole Ann Fabian and Kathleen Salomon

 

Carole Ann Fabian

Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Columbia University Libraries

1172 Amsterdam Avenue MC0301

New York, NY 10027

212-854-3068

 

Kathleen Salomon

Assistant Director, The Getty Research Institute

1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100

Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688

310.440.7482