Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative

A critical part of a museum's mission is to publish scholarly collection catalogues. Based on meticulous research, catalogues make available detailed information about the works in a museum's collection and ensure the contents have a place in art history. Yet printed volumes are costly to produce and difficult to regularly update; their potential content often exceeds allotted space.

In the first decade of the 21st century, digital publishing offered a tantalizing alternative. With online catalogues, museums could easily update content; reach global audiences; present high-resolution, interactive images; feature video and audio from the curator, conservator, or artist; and provide researchers with customized tools to take notes and share comments.

To meet this vision, the Foundation invited eight museums to work together as they developed online catalogues: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; Tate; and the Walker Art Center.

The Foundation began by awarding research-and-planning grants, then provided implementation support to build the catalogues. The project teams met at Getty regularly during the initiative to solve conceptual and technological problems, such as how to address scholars' expectations for trustworthy information and how to create a responsive web design that enabled optimal display on multiple devices.

Along the way, participants learned that online publishing is not business as usual, but rather requires rethinking long-held assumptions about research, writing, publishing, and organizational structure.

The digital world was very different when OSCI began (for instance, the iPad had not yet been released). Yet by the time the initiative ended in 2017, each museum had produced its own distinctive online catalogue and had new publications in process or already completed.

From 2009 to 2014, the Foundation made 20 grants to nine grantees totaling approximately $4.8 million.

2009: OSCI launches with research-and-planning grants, first convening at Getty
2010: Implementation grants begin
2011: Getty Foundation publishes OSCI interim report
2013: Final implementation grant awarded
2014: All OSCI catalogues are live and partners present their catalogues and what they learned at annual conferences of Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and College Art Association (CAA)
2015: Article on OSCI published in Art Libraries Journal
2017: OSCI concludes when the Foundation publishes a final report of the initiative using Quire, a new online tool developed by Getty Publications