Online Exhibition Catalogues, Brochures, Gallery Guides and Related Materials: Further resources

Online Exhibition Catalogues, Brochures, Gallery Guides and Related Materials

Published by Non-Profit Institutions for Free Viewing

Further resources

G2, a software marketplace, says that "...Flipbook software creates embeddable flipbooks for websites by converting files (such as PDFs) into HTML5. Users can upload preselected images through a PDF or presentation file and convert it into an automatic or interactable image scroll for a website. Some flipbook software is capable of creating full digital publications that simulate physical books with page turn animations." Software used to create online catalogs and brochures include FlippingBook, Flipsnack and Issuu, plus many more. Many museums also use .pdf files for gallerey guides, brochures and catalogs.

IMA Lab

The OSCI website says: "The IMA Lab, the media and technology arm of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is developing a suite of open-source software tools that will facilitate online publishing of scholarly catalogues by the museums involved in the Getty's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative and, eventually, the larger museum community. This collaborative, open-source software project is based on the successful prototype created by the IMA Lab for the Art Institute of Chicago." IMA Lab's project, the OSCIToolkit, is described here.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a means of locating digitized exhibition catalogues, which can be sourced by typing either "exhibition catalog" or "exhibition catalogue" (including the quotation marks) in its search box. Choose "All Media Types" when conducting a search.

MetPublications

In October 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art launched MetPublications, an online resource that offers in-depth access to the Museum's print and online publications, covering art, art history, archaeology, conservation, and collecting. Beginning with nearly 650 titles published from 1964, this addition to the Met's website continues to expand. It has free downloads of numerous catalogs, or the option of reading their full text online. For instance, as of June 2023 there were 19 MET catalogs posted covering 18th through 20th century American painting and sculpture. See Resource Library's sub-index page for Metropolitan Museum of Art for a partial ist of titles in .pdf format.

MetPublications includes a description and table of contents for almost every title, as well as information about the authors, reviews, and awards, and links to related Met titles by author and theme. Current in-print titles may be previewed and fully searched online, with links to purchase the books. The full contents of almost all other titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF, at no cost. Books can be read and searched through the Google Book program, an initiative to maximize access to the Met's books.

J. Paul Getty Museum Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative

Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) was a a joint effort by the Getty Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum. It was a five year initiative to bring together the resources of nine art museums. It endeavored to create ways to incorporate, beyond the usual static artwork images and text of print publications, audio and video into online catalogues, plus other features. The OSCI site said that through the efforts of the participants in the project: "...a completely new model of scholarly publishing is coming into focus, one in which robust future-focused technologies make comprehensive scholarly information available in beautifully rendered formats for devices as varied as iPads and dual-screen workstations. Readers will be able to study detailed images of artworks online, overlay them with conservation documentation, discover scholarly essays in easy-to-read formats, take notes in the margins that can be stored for later use, and export citations to their desktops. Moreover, the system of software tools under development is being designed to be both flexible and replicable so it can support a broad variety of other collections-based publication by museums into the future."

Online publications for OSCI include catalogues by the following museums + contacts:

Art Institute of Chicago / Monet Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago and Renoir Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago / Gloria Groom, Sam Quigley, Liz Neely

J. Paul Getty Museum / catalogue of the Museum's European paintings collected during recent years / Nik Honeysett

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution's Museums of Asian Art / catalogue concerning The Gerhard Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books /

Los Angeles Museum of Art / catalogue of approximately 60 objects from its important Southeast Asian collection /

National Gallery of Art / catalogue adapting and updating an existing print catalogue of the 17th-century Dutch paintings collection /

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art / catalogue of the Museum's collection of works by Robert Rauschenberg /

Seattle Art Museum / catalogue of the Museum's Chinese paintings and works of calligraphy /

Tate / catalogue focusing on the Museum's collection of works by the important British Post-Impressionist artists collectively known as the Camden Town Group /

Walker Art Center / catalogue of works acquired since 2005 /

A 50 page 2012 interim report titled Moving Museum Catalogues Online was available for download in .pdf format on the Getty Foundation's website. The participating museums planned to publish scholarly catalogues on their websites. It is not clear to what extent catalogues were available without charge to viewers.

We suggest that museums study AAMD's GUIDELINES FOR THE USE OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS AND WORKS OF ART BY ART MUSEUMS before publishing online their paper-printed gallery guides, brochures and catalogs. The report sheds light on our continuing concerns about publishing artworks and other copyrighted materials online.

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Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other Web sites and in employing referenced consultants or vendors. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although Traditional Fine Art Organization, Inc. includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over those other sites. For more information on evaluating web pages see Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc.'s General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.

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