If you’ve used the Getty’s website, you may be aware of the wealth of resources about the visual arts to be found across its pages. You may also have discovered several tools that make it possible to search specific repositories—from the Museum’s online collection to the Research Institute’s Collection Inventories and Finding Aids. These are fantastic sources for researchers, scholars, educators, and anyone doing research on the arts.

But did you ever wonder why there’s no single tool that allows you to search all these resources and see the results together in one place? Did you find yourself surprised that you couldn’t find some material—such as on a specific book or work of art—that you thought were part of the Getty holdings?

If you did, you weren’t the only one. The Getty’s leadership also recognized this challenge and asked a small team from across the organization to solve this problem. The result is the new Getty Search Gateway, which launched last week.

Landing page for the new Getty Search Gateway

Getty Search Gateway allows you to search for material contained in a variety of Getty repositories and receive well-organized, meaningful results. Initially, four sources have been included in the Getty Search Gateway:

  • J. Paul Getty Museum collection database
  • Getty Research Institute Research Library catalog
  • Getty Research Institute Collections Inventories and Finding Aids
  • Getty Research Institute Digital Collections

In the near future we’ll add to the tool by increasing the number of records in these repositories, as well as expanding to include new repositories.

The entry page introduces you to the current four resources and allows you to search by keyword, browse by collection or type of object (such as books, maps, paintings, and sculptures), and see highlights from our collections.

The search results page is the “workhorse” of Getty Search Gateway.  Here you can sort and page through your results, narrow your results using filters, select records to print or share with others, and export the data as XML. You can also narrow results to only records with images, or records of objects currently on display.

Sample search results page within Getty Search Gateway

There are also many advanced features to explore—and in the coming weeks, we’ll post more here with tips on using these.

We hope you’ll try Getty Search Gateway and tell us what you think using the feedback form. We’d like to know what resources you’d like to see included, as well as what additional features would make Getty Search Gateway even more useful. We look forward to responding to your questions and suggestions.
 

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