The collection catalogue re-born

Today even the museums that are the best at putting their collections online have a very limited amount of information online, for a limited number of objects. The National Gallery of Art has more online about more many works in its collection than just about any American museum, but even its fullest records -- such as for this Ribera -- stop short of the level of detail and breadth about which the Getty is talking. Other museums have emphasized public access: MoMA has added some social media sharing tools to its collection and will be adding more -- but it provides relatively little information about individual works online. And then there's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's online collection listings, which are, well, impossible to use for anything.

"Museums used to worry about a JPEG being the surrogate and not the original," Getty Foundation associate director Joan Weinstein, who is managing the project I started detailing yesterday, said. "Years ago the fear was, 'If we put it online then no one will come see original.' It sounds funny now, but in the early days that was the issue. No more. Museums see how people use their websites, and how they might better use their websites."

So aside from the obvious, how would an online, accessible-to-everyone-for-free online art museum collection catalogue be different from what museums do either online or in print?  Weinstein told me that the Getty started from the top.

"How do you not take what would just be a PDF page online, but totally re-think it for an online environment?" Weinstein said. "How do you track scholarship if it changes all the time? How do you reference something to a certain date if it's constantly updated?"

If everything goes well, the result will be 21st-century collection catalogues on steroids. Anyone with a web connection will be able to overlay x-rays of a painting over the 'actual' painting. Or see how curators through the years have changed their opinions on key points about a painting or an artist. Or see how conservators have helped paintings along. Or click from bibliography listings right to articles, or to related paintings in other museums' collections.

Weinstein said that there are some hurdles to creating Collection Catalogues 2.0: Curators were initially a bit hesitant to publish online because, well, you know, books are real and pixels aren't. Museums want to be sure that they respect the intellectual property and rights of living artists. Some museums are wary of putting super-high-quality large images of paintings online for fear that people will turn paintings into consumer objects. Curators are also worried that essays published in HTML aren't 'archival' in the same way books are, so the project will likely also enable unchangeable PDFs of scholarly essays. Finally, museums have done catalogues a certain way for decades. The Getty's nine initial institutions (the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian's Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the Walker, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA) are considering new ways of doing catalogues and who is -- and isn't -- involved in the process.

Right now the Getty is in the process of tracking how its initial group does everything, and it will document methods, compare costs and will share that information with the field. The Getty has asked the museums above (plus the Getty Museum) to apply for funding and in the next few months it will announce its first 'CC 2.0' grants. A next-gen catalogue could be online as soon as 2011.