Getty Research Portal Debuting on May 31st Will Provide Unlimited Access to Nearly 20,000 Digitized Art History Texts in Public Domain

From the Getty Research Institute:

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 the Getty Research Institute (GRI) will launch the Getty Research Portal, an unprecedented resource that will provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.
The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world’s art libraries. There will be no restrictions to use the Getty Research Portal; all anyone needs is access to the internet.
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The GRI worked with a number of institutions to create the Getty Research Portal—the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Frick Art Reference Library, and the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as members of the New York Art Resources Consortium; the Biblioteca de la Universidad de Málaga in Málaga, Spain; the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris; and the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg in Heidelberg. Together with the Getty Research Institute’s Library, these art libraries have already contributed nearly 20,000 digitized art history texts, which are immediately searchable via the Portal. Unlike other methods of searching for books online, every link in the Getty Research Portal leads directly to a complete digital surrogate that is free to download.
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Because the Getty Research Portal only aggregates the metadata of the digitized texts and links to them, instead of keeping the texts on a server, there are no technical limitations to how much material can be collected. However, given current restrictions on the digital dissemination of copyright materials, all of the content on the Portal will be limited to works published before 1923 which are considered part of the public domain.
The founding contributors to the Getty Research Portal are based in the US, France, Germany, and Spain, and their contributions are largely in European languages. However, the Portal can also depict non-Western characters, and, as more institutions join and more texts are added, it will be possible to search in any language, making the Getty Research Portal a global resource for the history of art of all cultures.

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Libraries, Resources