Dear Colleagues,
I’m pleased to present the minutes of the ARLIS/NA + VRA Auction Catalogs SIG meeting, Seattle, Washington, March 9, 2016.
Best regards,
Tina Lidogoster
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Tina M. Lidogoster
Assistant Museum Librarian
Thomas J. Watson Library
212 396 5367
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
@metmuseum
metmuseum.org
Meeting Minutes of ARLIS/NA + VRA 2016, Seattle, Auction Catalog SIG meeting Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Rodica Tanjala Krauss, Coordinator
Tina Lidogoster, Recorder
Agenda:
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Introductions
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SIG leadership for 2016-2017
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SCIPIO Guidelines incorporating RDA updates
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Web archiving
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Cataloging practice (s) for electronic Price Lists, online auctions, PDFs
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Projects/Collaborations/Internships
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New Resources/New tools
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Questions
________________________________________________________________________
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SIG leadership for 2016-2017
Leadership changes: Prima is stepping down from co-coordinator position. Call out was made for volunteers to co-coordinate with Rodica. Tina Lidogoster from the Watson Library volunteered. Other volunteers are invited to email Rodica if
interested in co-coordinating.
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SCIPIO Guidelines incorporating RDA updates
Rodica finished the final draft with updates and forwarded it to peers for review at the Watson Library and the Getty. Rodica distributed a copy of this draft around at the meeting. A request was made to see if the attendees have any recommendations.
In the interest of being more informed before making a decision, please send
Rodica an email to send both drafts and promise to look through it within one month and then respond to Rodica.
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Web archiving
Sumitra Duncan, Web Archiving Coordinator at the Frick spoke about NYARC's web archiving initiative for auction catalogs. Many of the online catalogues available are no longer being produced with a print
equivalent. NYARC has further tested out web archiving by capturing 40 auction house websites, currently in NYARC's Archive-It collection. They have discovered that the auction houses that create PDF catalogs are more easily captured using the Archive-It tool
vs. those that are publishing via their website within a list view that's generated from a back-end database, often produced in different ways. An additional approach that NYARC is testing is to look for specific auction catalogs through the Wayback Machine
of the Internet Archive, although this approach requires that you have the exact URL of the content you are looking for. This can be a problem if the URL no longer exists on the live web. In both approaches to providing access to the archived auction catalog,
the content is backed up by redundant storage copies in different geographic locations, thus they are confident they will be preserved. Archive-It provides synced backup to DuraCloud, which is subscribed to by the NYARC consortium, and all backups are stored
in both Amazon S3 and Glacier. Archive-It offers full text indexing of archived content so you can search within the Archive-It interface as well as the recently implemented NYARC discovery layer where one can search the full text indexing of all of the archived
content there. The Wayback machine does not presently offer full text search indexing. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches.
NYARC has compiled a list of auction houses which are creating PDFs and they are working on a priority list of those not producing them in print. Sumitra can share this list with anyone interested in working
collaboratively on web archiving or cataloging those auction catalogs available in the Wayback Machine.
Email Sumitra<mailto:[log in to unmask]> if you are interested in learning more.
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Cataloging practice (s) for electronic Price Lists, online auctions, PDFs
The electronic price list project is a collaboration with the Watson Library, the Getty, the Frick Art Reference Library, National Gallery, and more recently, Philadelphia Museum of Art. This project involves uploading the price list PDF’s
from each sale to a shared Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage account and adding a link to the price list in an 856 field in the bibliographic record. In the time between when the bibliographic record is created and when the price list is uploaded by one
of the project partners, the link will send you to a page of useful auction sales resources to find the price list directly from the auction house site. Once the price list is uploaded it is available to all researchers via the link in the bibliographic record
of the sale. For information on joining this effort or training please email
Tina at the Watson Library.
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Projects/Collaborations/Internships
Frick Art Reference Library has been offering unpaid summer internships on matters relating to historic auction catalogs for many years. The projects varied, from teaching cataloging skills, to actually enhancing SCIPIO records, to creating
bibliographic records for auction house websites, to preparing material for digitization, to participating in web archiving. Additionally, interns are exposed to all the other library activities such as collection development/acquisitions, reference, and
conservation.
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Digital Initiatives
The Frick Art Reference Library is in partnership with Brill to add over 3400 digitized auction catalogs from their collection, over a five-year period, to ASCO (Art Sales Catalogs Online), an online database reproducing the print version
of Frits Lugt’s, “Reìpertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques.” The digitization is done on the Library’s premises, and the scans are sent to Brill every other 6 months. The cost of digitization is covered by Brill.
Additionally, the Library just initiated a project to digitize all of its historic auction catalog collection not included in the Brill project, and any other new acquisition of historic or unique auction catalogs (an ongoing process.)
Watson Library has provided over 3,400 catalogs on the Internet Archive (available
here). Currently the focus has been American houses, many from American Art Association, and Watson Library is moving to begin adding German auction catalogs as well. Watson Library
follows a one record approach whereby a link to the digitized auction catalog is added to the record for the print copy or vice versa depending on which item was cataloged first.
Getty Research Institute: provides digitized auction sales catalogs available through Primo and OCLC portal. The Getty Portal has been aggregating the metadata of digitized collections of the INASHA, the Heidelberg, INHA, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
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Art Discovery Group
ADG recently implemented SCIPIO specific indexes, such as date of sale, place of sale, seller/collector. However, SCIPIO specific index searches only work for records cataloged in SCIPIO. For example, searching for German sales from 1900-1944
cataloged by Heidelberg University, will not retrieve any, because they do not include SCIPIO specific indexes. Since the European libraries have the largest collections of historic auction catalogs it would be immensely beneficial if they were accessed by
American libraries. Rodica suggested two options: either to extend SCIPIO specific cataloging by the European libraries, or to extend RDA cataloging to auction catalogs.
Cathleen Solomon is attending the next Art Discovery Group Committee meeting in June and will ask if they can apply those indexes to the new and historic auction catalogs.
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New Resources/New tools
Rodica mentioned two online resources recently found online:
Art World in Britain 1660-1735
Publishes primary sources and research tools for the study of the arts in late 17th and early 18th century Britain. The Frick used it for establishing collectors and auctioneers, and date of sale
for catalogs lacking them.
British Art Suppliers from 1650-1950 This biographical resource is devoted to British and foreign firms of artists’
suppliers operating in Britain and British firms operating overseas. Rodica used it for similar purposes as the previous source.
Question:
If you would like to propose a session/talk/poster/session for next year’s ARLIS/NA please email
Rodica.
These minutes were compiled by Tina Lidogoster and the session was coordinated by Rodica T. Krauss.
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Rodica Tanjala Krauss, Head, Cataloging Projects
Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection
10 East 71st Street New York, NY 10021
Tel.: 212/547-0653 F.: 212/547-0680
[log in to unmask]
www.frick.org
--
Tina M. Lidogoster
Assistant Museum Librarian
Thomas J. Watson Library
212 396 5367
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
@metmuseum
metmuseum.org