An image archive record from The Frick showing the conservation history of a painting. Via http://www.frick.org/research/photoarchive
The Art Newspaper has a report about a plan to make the image archives of major art libraries in the US and Europe available online in the one place. (This was reported yesterday and for a moment I thought it might be an April Fool’s joke because it seemed like such an impossibly useful thing for these libraries to do!) The group is called the The International Digital Photo Archive Consortium and includes the Frick Art Reference Library in New York, the National Gallery of Art library in Washington, DC, London’s Witt Library (the Courtauld Institute of Art), the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg in Germany and seven other institutions.
From The Art Newspaper (full story here):
More than 30 million images of paintings, drawings and sculptures could soon be available on one website if art history photo archives across the world agree to a joint digitisation project. Inge Reist, director of the Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting, says it would “revolutionise” art history.
The International Digital Photo Archive Consortium includes the Frick Art Reference Library in New York, the National Gallery of Art library in Washington, DC, London’s Witt Library (the Courtauld Institute of Art), the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg in Germany and seven other institutions.
Many of these archives still mount images of works with captions on thin card, filed by artist, in alphabetical order. Each artist work is subdivided by type—for example portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Most have not been digitised, so researchers have to visit the library in person.
The plan is to digitise the 31.5 million cards held by 14 of the world’s leading archives and then upload them on the web to make them easily searchable. No decisions have been made on what would be available free or for a charge. The images would be for research purposes, rather than reproduction.
- Katrina Grant