Getty Institute Opens Unique Digital Library

Getty Research Portal Launched on Thursday, it was developed by the Getty Research Institute, a so-called Getty Museum sibling. The portal provides any Internet user - a scientist, student or an ordinary user - free access to a kind of art version of Google Books, containing about 20,000 digitized materials on the history of art and architecture.

When Anna Jensen Adams, professor at the California Institute in Santa Barbara and author of research in Dutch painting of the 17th century, happened to visit the new Internet portal Getty Research Portal, her first request was the name of the largest Dutch painter Karel van Mander.

What was her surprise when the full text version of the “Book of Artists” (1604) by Karel van Mander was found on the site, describing the life of Dutch and German artists and written by a Dutch master under the influence of Giorgio Vasari’s book “Biographies of illustrious painters, sculptors and architects”.

“If there wasn’t this portal acting as a unifier of information, I would never have found this rarity,” admits Anna Jensen Adams.

When creating the Getty Research Portal, in addition to works from its own library, the Getty Research Institute used sources from eight other cultural institutions. Today, they include Columbia University, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Institute of Art History (INHA) in Paris, the University of Malaga in Spain and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Full digitized copies of documents can be downloaded on the Getty Research Portal absolutely free.

However, since US copyright laws prohibit the free digitization of sources created after 1923, most of the documents presented on the portal date back to 1923 and are considered a national treasure. So, a simple search for Renoir returns only five results, while a Rembrandt query returns 51 results.

To date, the collection mainly contains works in European languages. “We only have a few books on Chinese art in Chinese,” said Murtha Baka, Getty Research Institute program digitizer. “But this is just the beginning: in the future, the emphasis will be on the development and replenishment of the collection.”

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