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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- ANNOUNCEMENT The Eugene V. & Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust has awarded funding of $140,000 to the Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection to cover a two-year project (1998-99) for the retrospective conversion of 70,000 auction sale catalog records into SCIPIO, the international database for shared holdings of sale catalogs. The Library is one of the largest repositories of these unique records that track provenance and ownership of works of art through auction houses, individual auctioneers, and private dealers, and serve to reconstruct the history of patronage and taste. The Library's holdings date back to 1616 and include a group of 2,150 sales listed in Lugts' four volume Repertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques (1600-1925) as unique in North America or the world. This project will support the Frick Art Reference Library's efforts to make documentation about its collection of auction sale catalogs more widely accessible to the international community of researchers and scholars. These important art historical documents, in combination with the Library's other valuable bibliographic and photographic materials, will continue to build a text and image research center for the twenty-first century. In addition to this project, a five-year retrospective conversion program is underway that will provide integrated access to all of the Library's holdings. The Library has been a contributor to SCIPIO for current cataloging since 1996, and has been a contributing member of the Provenance Documentation Collaborative. Patricia Barnett Andrew W. Mellon Librarian February 20, 1998