2016/03/01 by Samantha Deutch, Sally McKay · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Museums and Cultural Heritage #Art History and Market Analysis #Digital and Traditional Archives Management #Art #Art history #Visual arts #Computer graphics (images) #Computer science #World Wide Web
paper · doi:10.1086/685975
openalex publication_date 2016/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Historically, art librarians saved ephemera—exhibition checklists, gallery announcements, biographical information, and reproductions of works of art—in collections known as artist files. Increasingly, this information is created only in digital formats. While one hopes that art galleries and artists are preserving this information, in many cases they are not, or at least not in ways that are accessible or intended for long-term access. To remedy this situation, the Artist Files Special Interest Group of the Art Libraries Society of North America has been exploring ways to preserve and provide access to these resources for future scholars. This article describes two collaborative projects. The first is a national directory, created by the group in 2007, which helps users locate these often elusive materials. The second is a collaborative initiative that currently involves representatives from four institutions using Archive-It to capture, store, and provide access to this information, now and into the future.