Today was a good-news day for me, personally and professionally.
I accompanied my close friend, who had lung cancer, for her post-chemotherapy scan, and her doctor pronounced her cancer-free, predicting she’d live to be 100. (The latter declaration may be slightly exaggerated, but the former was sufficient to make our summer.)
I returned home to this e-mail from the J. Paul Getty Trust’s press office:
ProQuest, an information technology firm supporting
global research, and the Getty Research Institute (GRI), dedicated to advancing understanding
of the world’s artistic heritage, announce an agreement that will allow ProQuest to take over
the indexing of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), providing a secure future for a
resource considered central to the study of art history. The agreement assures the database’s
continuing development and accessibility to researchers around the world.ProQuest will
retain the editorial policies which made IBA one of the most trusted and frequently consulted
sources in the field, continuing to provide full abstracts and subject indexing for its wide
international and multi-lingual range of periodicals, monographs and catalogues. Over time,
ProQuest also intends to expand coverage of art from Asia, Latin America and Africa in
response to requests from art librarians and researchers.
IBA, which began in 2008, was the successor to the Bibliography of the the History of Art (BHA) (already available through ProQuest). A few months ago, the Getty created dismay among art scholars and librarians by deciding that it would not longer provide financial support for updates to this important art historical research tool. (I wrote more about this contretemps for the Wall Street Journal, here.)
Best known to web surfers as the paywall portal for the digital archives of newspapers, dissertations and journals, ProQuest also publishes databases in the arts, including ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index and the International Index to Music Periodicals.
Kudos to the Getty Research Institute for persevering to make this happen. Now there’s some catching up to do: Updates to the database stopped after December 2009.
Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the GRI, said that the Getty “will continue to
make the historical BHA and RILA data available on the website free of charge to researchers
who access it.” I assume that means that accessing new content to be created under ProQuest auspices will incur a fee (as did the BHA, until the Getty withdrew its support for updates).
There’s more about this laudable development in the press release, here.