Celebrating its 4th anniversary, the Getty Research Portal has redesigned its portal to make it easier for people to explore, share, and download the 100,000 freely available digitized art history texts it hosts.
Over the year, the Los Angeles-based research institute has been scanning thousands of books and journals documenting various artistic fields, which include art, architecture, and culture.
Here, people can search for directly, or filter by creator, subject, language, source, or date range. And not limited to that, as the Getty Research Institute also wants to expand its online library to include other art sources, like from India, Iran, and Japan.
The database is freely available for people to see, as a way for Getty to provide a greater public service over the internet.
Announcing the initiative, “scholars and researchers can now be in possession of copies of rare books and other titles without having to travel to far-flung locales,” said the project’s content specialist, Annie Rana.
The portal’s catalog includes contributions from hundreds of institutions, including some of the world’s most renowned art libraries, such as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, the Guggenheim Museum Library in New York, and the Warburg Institute Library in London.
The project follows the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who led the charge.
The museum's Open Access policy made them put hundreds of thousands of images under the Creative Commons. Teaming up with the Internet Archive, the museum has made its collection more accessible than ever.
