This is the repository for Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age: A Final Report on the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), published February 2017 by the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles. This free online edition and a downloadable PDF are available at www.getty.edu/foundation/osci-report.
The report was created with Getty Publications’ middleman book template, which has been used for other digital publications, including catalogues of ancient terracottas and roman mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum. The template is a prototype for an open source package currently under development by the Getty, which will be made available for use by other museums and publishers. Information about the Getty’s digital publishing efforts can be found at www.getty.edu/publications/digital.
Publishing scholarly collection catalogues is a critical part of a museum’s mission. Based on meticulous research, these catalogues make available detailed information about the individual works in a museum’s collection, ensuring the contents a place in art history. Yet printed volumes are costly to produce and difficult to update regularly; their potential content often exceeds allotted space. Digital publishing presents an alternative, and the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) is helping museums make the transition from printed volumes to multimedia, web-based publications freely available to anyone with a computer, tablet, or smartphone. The Foundation launched OSCI in 2009 in partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum and eight other institutions: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art; 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.
We are dedicated to maintaining the report at the permanent URL, www.getty.edu/foundation/osci-report, and in its various formats and incarnations. Any updates made to the report subsequent to its publication will be recorded here, in the commit history of this repository.
The primary content pieces of the report can be found in the data and source directories. The master branch represents the current, published edition at all times, and the revisions branch, when present, will show changes currently under consideration but not yet pushed to the published edition. We invite you to submit suggestions or corrections via pull request on the revisions branch, by posting an issue, or by emailing us at pubsinfo@getty.edu.
Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age © 2017 J. Paul Getty Trust. Except as noted in the sidebar of the online edition, this report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).
Proteus Middleman © 2014–2015 thoughtbot, inc. Proteus Middleman is free software and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the license.