Museum
Catalogues
in the
Digital Age

A Final Report on the Getty Foundation’s
Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI)

Publishing scholarly collection catalogues is a critical part of a museum’s mission. Based on meticulous research, these catalogues make available detailed information about the individual works in a museum’s collection, ensuring the contents a place in art history. Yet printed volumes are costly to produce and difficult to update regularly; their potential content often exceeds allotted space. Digital publishing presents an alternative, and the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) is helping museums make the transition from printed volumes to multimedia, web-based publications freely available to anyone with a computer, tablet, or smartphone. The Foundation launched OSCI in 2009 in partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum and eight other institutions: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; Tate; and the Walker Art Center.

Introduction

Published by the Getty Foundation. Except as noted in the sidebar, thisThis report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

© 2017 J. Paul Getty Trust
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