How to create one central online location, so that anyone in the world could access all these materials? That’s the challenge that sparked the Getty Research Portal, an online platform that for the past 10 years has made texts from dozens of institutions freely available to all.
Users can find architectural periodicals from Brazil, 19th-century British botanical illustrations, century-old Japanese art journals, a catalog of medieval rings, contemporary museum publications, rare books dating back to the 16th century, you name it—the Portal has become a go-to destination for researchers on the web and is only growing. Getty now collaborates with 45 institutions around the world to share 180,000 plus art records online, with the data available in standardized open format for anyone to access and download. The Portal spans 11 countries and more than 65 languages, making it an increasingly global resource.
The Portal is an especially useful tool for scholars and students without access to a major art history library. It also allows users to compare records in a way that was previously impossible, since researchers couldn’t be in multiple holding libraries at once. The Portal team sometimes aids comparisons by curating “virtual collections” from items so that researchers can see how different materials relate to one another across institutions.
For Beth Ann Whittaker, associate director of the Sam Francis Foundation, the Tokyo National Research Institute’s collection of rare art exhibition catalogs on the Portal yielded an unexpected discovery related to the famed painter. “We have actually found an incredible publication from 1955 that we believe Sam Francis was included in and that we have never previously seen,” she said. “So amazing!”
The Research Institute continues to spearhead this project, working to rapidly digitize its own holdings, encourage others to digitize theirs, and to add new contributors.
