A Century of Western Art Bibliography Now Available Online

OpenBibArt, an open-access art-historical database, is now online, making nearly a century of western bibliography on art history easily available to all.

The result of a successful collaboration among three institutions: the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris, the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, and the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique of the CNRS (Inist-CNRS) in Nancy, OpenBibArt unifies the contents of four related datasets, whose history is described below, into a single open search platform developed by Inist-CNRS.

“This remarkable initiative was made possible through the hard work and creative efforts of each of the partners,” said Kathleen Salomon, associate director and chief librarian at the Getty Research Institute. “OpenBibArt will help bring the published research and ideas of previous generations of scholars to new audiences, not only to learn from them, but also to consider them anew in the context of a broader and more inclusive art history.”

Researchers may freely search OpenBibArt in French or English to discover a wide range of citations from among nearly 1.2 million journal articles, books, and exhibition and auction sales catalogues published between 1910 and 2007 on topics in the arts and archeology from late Antiquity to the mid-2000s.

Over the course of nearly 100 years, each of the four resources now included in OpenBibArt played a significant role in systematically documenting hundreds of thousands of art-historical and archeological publications of their time.

Beginning in 1910 with the painstaking efforts of French art historians and librarians, the Répertoire d’Art et d’Archéologie (RAA) was under the auspices of the Bibliothèque d’Art et d’Archéologie in Paris (now the INHA) until 1973, when it moved to the CNRS, continuing there through 1990. In 1975 a parallel effort, the Répertoire International de la Littérature de l’Art/International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA) began in the United States, initially sponsored by the College Art Association (CAA), first at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and later supported by the J. Paul Getty Trust. Finally, between 1990 and 2007, Inist-CNRS and the Getty Research Institute co-sponsored a cooperative transatlantic bibliography, the Bibliographie d’Histoire de l’Art/Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA).

For more information visit https://openbibart.fr/home/

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