The collection catalogue is dead, long live the catalogue

There is a section of one of my bookcases where I keep collection catalogues from museums such as the Walker, MCASD, and so on. It's a great reference for when I want to find images to use on MAN or when I just want to look something up.

The problem is that it's a ridiculously incomplete shelf. I can't afford MoMA's umpteen different collection catalogues, nor the Met's 243 tomes. (I made that number up; it may be low.) Even if I could afford to buy the collection catalogues from, say, America's 20 most important museums, where would I keep them all? That's a lot of bound paper. Because of cost and volume, collections and the scholarship done about them are primarily accessible to two groups of people: People who live in City X who can visit the extremely limited percentage of collection on view at City X Museum on a given day, and scholars who have access to libraries with excellent art-related books collections. If I feel like looking at the Nelson-Atkins' Caravaggio -- let alone learning more about it -- the available images and information are limited.

Enter the Getty Foundation, which is working on a program that could transform how museums catalogue their collections and how they share their art and scholarship with the public. The Getty's project is ambitious: It aims to replace the expensive dead-tree scholarly catalogue with an open-source, web-accessible-to-all, digital catalogue format. For now the Getty is working with nine museums on the initial stage of the project: the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian's Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Walker, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA.

"In transforming the catalogues to an online environment, they won't be just scholarly," Getty Foundation associate director Joan Weinstein told me. Weinstein is managing the Getty project. "The premise is that you can include all kinds of information online that you can't in a print volume, information for everyone from the general public to students to scholars. You don't have to wait until everything's complete to put it online. You can have multiple voices in single entries: For more recent work, you can have both artists and curators speaking. Same thing for older collections. You can have conservators speaking and you can put the conservation documentation online. You could even super-impose an x-ray onto the image of a work of art itself."

Read more: The Getty's first publication detailing its online cataloguing initiative, how it might work and how museums would have to change in order to provide better access to their art collections.

Tomorrow: What all this would involve for museums -- and what it would enable for the rest of us.