Information from www.oclc.org

The new Art Discovery Group Catalogue, a view of WorldCat that brings together items from leading art libraries around the world, was launched today at the Art Libraries Society of North America annual conference, in Washington, D.C.

Coordinated by artlibraries.net, an international working community of more than 100 art libraries from 16 countries, the new catalogue offers an art-focused research experience within the WorldCat environment. Art library catalogues will now be searchable alongside additional content from a multitude of online journals and databases, promising more results on a global scale. The project has been developed as part of The Future of Art Bibliography initiative, with generous support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and The Getty Research Institute, whose initial funding made the launch possible.

“The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is the best place to start for art-related content discovery,” said Geert-Jan Koot, Head of the Rijksmuseum Research Library in Amsterdam. “Art historians want a unified, focused, and reliable service to provide comprehensive research findings and pinpoint discovery of individual items in the world’s leading art libraries. The artlibraries.net and Future of Art Bibliography groups have collaborated with OCLC to provide such a tool for art research, along with access to the core functions of WorldCat and its global library holdings.”

The Art Discovery Group Catalogue will initially include the holdings of art libraries from Europe, North America and Australia. Additional art libraries will join the initiative. Participating libraries include the IRIS Consortium in Italy, the Institut National d’Histoire d’Art (INHA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the kubikat union catalogue of the German research institutes in Florence, Munich, Paris and Rome, and the National Gallery of Australia.

“The artlibraries.net group chose to work with OCLC for development of the Art Discovery Group Catalogue because we were very impressed with WorldCat’s search functionality, including its scoping and faceting of result sets, fast response times, and unlimited scalability,” said Véronique Goncerut Estèbe, Chief Conservator at the Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie in Geneva, Switzerland. “We also chose WorldCat because, as the world’s largest research database, its searches can include holdings of thousands of libraries worldwide and more than 200 million journal articles from sources such as ArticleFirst. This new level of global exposure will maximize discovery and use of our collections.”

“The addition of more art libraries in WorldCat and the focused Art Discovery Group Catalogue will greatly benefit audiences who, while used to searching WorldCat, have not yet been introduced to many of the treasures held in art libraries internationally,” said Kathleen Salomon, Assistant Director of The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, USA.

“The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a great resource for scholars, students or anyone else interested in art,” said Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director, OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa. “We look forward to continuing our work with these prestigious art libraries and others who want to join in adding to this global catalogue dedicated to the study of art.”

The following art libraries are already participating in the Art Discovery Group Catalogue:

National Gallery of Australia
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia
National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Great Britain
Biblioteca dell’Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, Switzerland
Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie (BAA), Musées d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, Switzerland
Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Switzerland
Rijksmuseum Research Library Amsterdam, Netherlands
Kunstbibliothek Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Germany
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, Germany
Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art), Paris, France
Institut National d’Histoire d’Art (INHA), Paris, France
Biblioteca Berenson (Villa I Tatti), Florence, Italy
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Italy
Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut), Florence, Italy
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, (NYARC),New York, USA
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ingalls Library, Cleveland, USA
Frick Art Reference Library, (NYARC), New York, USA
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Museum of Modern Art Library and Museum Archives, (NYARC), New York, USA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA
Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago, USA
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
University of Texas Art Library, Austin, USA
Berenson Library, Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy
National Museum of Western Art, Research Library, Tokyo, Japan
Sächsische Landesbibliothek–Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB), Germany
Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA
Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York, USA
Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (Netherlands Institute for Art History), Netherlands

A list of participating institutions will be updated and can be found at http://library.rijksmuseum.nl/ArtDiscovery.htm.