The Museums and Catalogues

Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) debuted its first digital catalogue, Monet Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2014 and has published fourteen to date. The AIC was a participant in the early Getty-funded Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) and has developed all of its catalogues on the Drupal-based OSCI toolkit platform. The catalogues selected for this study are all peer-reviewed, entry-based publications featuring curatorial and conservation texts on works in the museum’s collection. The OSCI toolkit platform has enabled the use of zoomable images, 360-degree spins, layered and annotated images, videos, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) interactive images in these catalogues. The publications have been viewed by more than 125,000 users since their inception, according to the Google Analytics. The AIC intends to continue publishing collection catalogues digitally, but may need to find a new platform with which to do so in the near future, so the results of this study will inform that next step.

https://www.artic.edu/digital-publications

Included in this study:

J. Paul Getty Museum

The Getty has published five digital catalogues since 2016, with four more slated for production in the coming years. The Getty uses a multiformat publishing tool called Quire that it is currently developing to use internally and hope to also release as open source software. Some of the central lessons from OSCI were around the need for discoverability and longevity of online publications. Quire is meant to address those challenges head on. It is centered around a static site generator called Hugo and outputs a website, ebook, and pdf versions of the publication from a common set of plain-text source files. The multiple formats allow for both a greater distribution and a hedge against loss. Additionally, the website is such that it requires no special server setup to host, and no ongoing maintenance or updating to keep running. Of the Quire books the Getty has published so far or has forthcoming, many are collection catalogues, though Quire also supports the publication of collected volumes, scholarly monographs, and other types of publications.

http://www.getty.edu/publications/digital/

Included in this study:

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) launched its Online Editions (OE) platform in 2014 as part of OSCI. To date, six OE collection catalogues have been published in full or incremental releases. OE catalogues exclusively address permanent collection objects and are integrated in the NGA’s main online collection pages. As is the case for all collection object pages, certain data fields are populated dynamically from The Museum System (TMS) collections database through an application programming interface (API). Static content specific to the OE, including the object entry essays and technical summaries, is housed in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), the Gallery’s web content-management system (CMS). Search capabilities parallel the broader collection search tools available on the NGA’s website, and new functionality developed for the collection pages is automatically integrated into existing OE catalogues. The first five OE catalogues focused on paintings; the 2019 launch of the Alfred Stieglitz Key Set expanded the OEs to the NGA’s photography collection and required extensive customization of the platform to accommodate the different demands of the corpus.

https://www.nga.gov/research/online-editions.html

Included in this study:

Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) released its first online catalogue, The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, in 2018. It was informed by benchmarking of previous OSCI projects as well as user surveys of the target audience, and by formative evaluation (user testing) during its development. It is integrated into the museum’s website, drawing some data via an API from TMS. It also integrates digitized archival materials from the museum’s Library and Archives. It published just one small portion of a larger collection, and the intention is to continue to add content to the publication over time; it is also intended to be a model for scholarly digital publications on other parts of the museum’s collections.

https://philamuseum.org/publications/

Included in this study: