The J. Paul Getty Trust supports the humanities and visual arts through varied organizational components including the Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art, and the Getty Education Institute for the Arts. These separate entities have created and maintained a multiplicity of electronic research tools. The Web site designers have incorporated an index allowing users to locate several publicly accessible electronic tools from a single page, reducing the frustration of searching the entire site. This index provides access to finding aids, research tools, searchable image collections for K‐12 curricula, and information on the controlled description and vocabulary (cataloging tools) for works of art.
Electronic finding aids to the Getty collections will be useful to potential onsite researchers. IRIS, the INNOPAC online catalog of the Getty Research Library, contains bibliographic records for over 400,000 books and serial titles and 100,000 auction catalogs held in the library. Rare books, photographs, archival materials, manuscripts, prints, and drawings are also included. Standard author/title/subject/ keyword searching is enhanced by the capability to search by both provenance and form (e.g. diaries, artists, books, photographs, prints, and drawings). Separate finding aids exist for both the Research Library Photo Study Collection and the Special Collections. The Photo Study Collection database does not contain images but rather 300,000 records representing half the collection. Particularly useful is the ability to search images by subject. Several finding aids for the Getty Special Collections are also available and searchable in full text, including scope and content notes, biographical notes, and historical notes.
The Getty Provenance Index contains over 500,000 records providing insight into both the provenance of individual works of art and the history of taste and collecting. The information included in the individual records comes from sale catalogs, archival records, and museum files. Best known is the Sales Index Project, including a database of sale catalogs and a second database of the catalogs’ contents. The scope of this project includes nineteenth century Belgian, British, French, and Dutch catalogs as well as seventeenth and eighteenth century German and Scandinavian catalogs.
The “Links to the Internet” will be of limited general interest. Because these links have been chosen with users of the Getty Center’s physical space in mind, distance users will certainly become frustrated with their inability to gain access to licensed materials. Approximately 50 percent of each subject subset (arranged alphabetically from “Architecture and Design” to “Travel Resources”) are subscription databases requiring the user to be in the Getty IP range. The remaining link groups vary in quality but basically include lists of metasites such as Voice of the Shuttle, Yahoo!, and Virtual Library pages. The most useful section, not surprisingly, is the link to “Art Museums, Galleries, and Auction Houses,” which includes an exceptionally thorough listing of dealers and repositories.
Notably absent from the site is the formerly available free access to International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA, 1975‐1989) and a limited span of Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals (1977‐1992) once provided by the now defunct Getty Information Institute. While their continued public availability was never guaranteed, their disappearance is still lamentable and reduces the value of linking to this index page for more general collections. Of course, both titles are still available by subscription.
ArtsEdNet is a Getty project to encourage art education across the K‐12 curriculum. The Image Galleries contain an eclectic collection of approximately 300 images by over 140 artists. The collection does not attempt to be comprehensive; however, the accompanying curriculum guides are an excellent resource themselves. The best of these curricula include lesson plans, primary source readings, image collections, and bibliographies. The curricular focus is on a multicultural study of the arts with a broad geographic and temporal scope. The search system is not particularly efficient, simply because the collection is too small to make guesses about what is and is not included. Individual reproductions are listed alphabetically, by title, and chronologically. Curricula are listed alphabetically as well as by grade level. Although downloads are prohibited, images can be used in a non‐profit educational context.
Finally, those who are involved in the controlled description of works of art will find the projects of the Standards Program of interest. The objective of the Standards Program is to create standards for organizing and providing access to information about art and images. Links to both the Categories for the Description of Works of Art and the Guide to the Description of Architectural Drawings appear in this general list. Both these projects include guidelines for fields that should be included in a scholarly catalog record for a work of art or its image. Perhaps of more interest for the general researcher would be a link to the Art Information Task Force’s Bibliography of Controlled Vocabulary Sources (http://www.getty.edu/gri/standard/cdwa/FULLBIB.HTM), which provides online access to Getty projects such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artists’ Names and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
Members of three disparate audiences may find this site of use: art historians, K‐12 educators wanting to integrate the visual arts into their curricula, and library or museum professionals interested in the descriptive cataloging of works of art or images. However, much of the information on this site clearly is geared toward onsite users. Even on the general list, a link to the Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance is prominently positioned but requires a password to gain access to anything more than a demo. Although a substantial number of pages within the Getty site are individually worthy of strong recommendation, this particular collection of links neither is comprehensive enough nor holds together as a coherent body. Recommend with reservations.
