Art Libraries Society
of
Roosevelt Hotel
Moderator: Barbara Rockenbach, JSTOR Library Relations
(Associate Director: ARTstor)
Session speakers:
Lorcan Dempsey, VP,
Research, OCLC
David Yakimischak,
Chief Technology Officer, JSTOR
Chistine Kuan,
Editor, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press
Terence Ford, Head,
Research Databases, Getty Research Institute
Ron Miller, Director
of Product Management, H.W. Wilson Company
Recorder: Max Marmor, ARTstor
The speakers in this session explored possibilities for navigating in new ways across online art information resources. Most were invited to describe the thinking of their respective projects. Resources discussed included: ARTstor, the Getty indexing and abstracting services (Avery Index, BHA), Oxford University Press’s Grove Art Online, JSTOR’s new art history collection (which already includes full runs of Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, October, et al.) and others. The Session was introduced from the wider perspective of digital repository interoperability solutions under development in the digital library and e-learning communities.
Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC) provided an overture to the session, offering a broad overview of the interoperability landscape, focusing especially on the wide range of relevant resources, from online information resources to “learning objects,” and the complexity of this evolving landscape.
David Yakimischak (JSTOR) described the challenges JSTOR has faced in developing collections in the areas of the history of art and architecture, the technical and policy solutions they have developed, and possible approaches to interoperability being explored by this full-text archive of scholarly journal literature. Particular topics discussed included: resource discovery, naming and description, linking and references, metasearching, and harvesting, as well as interoperability possibilities being explored between JSTOR and ARTstor.
Christine Kuan (Grove Art Online) described the efforts underway at Oxford University Press to enable full exploitation of the rich content of Grove Art Online. She focused on the diverse audiences OUP seeks to serve (teachers and students at all levels, museum and gallery professionals, collectors, librarians, artists, journalists, and the general public); the distinct needs of art historians (for images, for contemporary art, for criticism and theory); approaches to interoperating with other online art resources.
Terence Ford (Getty Research Institute) briefly described Getty’s ongoing efforts to enhance the value of its research databases (especially the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and the Bibliography of the History of Art), and way these efforts leverage Getty’s work in the areas of standards and controlled vocabularies.
Ron Miller (H.W. Wilson) described the work being done by Wilson to facilitate interoperability across the wide spectrum of Wilson’s own resources, including searching across these resources via controlled vocabularies; Open URL linking to other products via SFX; and interoperability with metasearch products.