The Getty Research Institute as a DPLA Content Hub

The impetus for my report subject selection was actually a blog headline from September 2014:

“100,000 Digitized Art History Materials from the Getty Research Institute Now Available in the Digital Public Library of America,” published on the Getty Iris, the online magazine of the Getty Trust. However, this press release represents just one component of an ongoing collaborative relationship between the Getty and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). While these two organizations have some overlapping boundaries (the Getty does have a special collections library, digital collections, and online search portal), the scope, missions, and structure of the two organizations seemed different enough to warrant analysis. Also, one would expect a partnership such as this to be a fruitful and well-organized due to the stature and reputation of the Getty, however such presumptions can prove to be premature upon closer examination.

The Los Angeles-based J. Paul Getty Trust is truly a cultural force, extending its reach far beyond the famed museum. Indeed, the organization is the largest cultural and philanthropic organization dedicated to the visual arts. It’s four programs, committed to “research, conservation, education, and digital innovation,” in the field comprise of the Getty Conservation Institute, The Getty Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Getty Research Institute. The Getty Research Institute (GRI) is the scholarly and outreach wing of the organization, committed to advancing research in the visual arts and humanities “through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs.” The GRI includes the Getty’s Research Library and Special Collections, has spearheaded many search and retrieval platform developments, and is home to the Getty Vocabularies (AAT, TGN, etc.), familiar to many working or researching in the LAM field.

Collaborations with other organizations are a central part of the GRI’s strategic vision. In addition to the DPLA, the GRI has ongoing collaborative projects, including the Art Discover Group Catalogue, “an art-focused research experience within the OCLC WorldCat environment,” launched in 2014 out of an international working group of over 100 art libraries with the OCLC, a metadata exchange and Getty Vocabulary enhancement program with ARTstor, and the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, a longstanding partnership with the Census focused on the development and maintenance of an interdisciplinary research database centering on Renaissance studies.

The DPLA, as many of us are familiar, has local roots despite its national (and international) affiliations. The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University hosted the organizations steering committee with major planning initiated in 2010, and ultimate launch in 2013. The DPLA’s vision is to serve as a national digital library, as portal to diverse resources, a platform embracing open source code and open data, and as a public advocate for open access to information materials. The DPLA is funded via a range of foundations and governmental agencies, and is slowly developing broader presence and recognition. While the long-term success of the DPLA will require continuation of funding, and outreach efforts aimed at increasing its relevancy in an information portal, the DPLA explicitly states they would not exist with their Content and Service Hubs, partner institutions that aggregate metadata from their respective communicates and contribute it to the DPLA.

The J. Paul Getty Trust is one of the DPLA’s current sixteen Content Hubs. Content Hubs are the heavyweight one-to-one content partners that can provide “more than 200,000 unique metadata records that resolve to digital objects (online texts, photographs, manuscript material, art work, etc.) to the DPLA, and commit to maintaining and enhancing those records as needed.” Other Content Hubs include the Internet Archive, The Harvard Library, HathiTrust, The U.S. Government Publishing Office, New York Public Library, and the National Archives and Records Administration. As a DPLA Content Hub, the GRI committed to aggregate metadata to its rare and unique collections in art history and visual culture, rare and documentary photograph collections, manuscripts, prints, sketchbooks, architectural drawings, artist papers, and archives that provide perspectives on artistic production, and contribute metadata from the Getty Research Portal, which aggregates metadata for thousands of digitized art history texts online search platform providing global access to digitized art history texts. The Portal is a free search tool that serves as a multilingual, multicultural union catalog scholars can search and download complete digital copies of publications for the study of art, architecture, material culture, and related fields.

It might seem odd that an organization like the Getty, which already supports an online search platform (several, actually), expansive digital collections, curated exhibits, and extensive research into bibliographic and metadata improvements, would expend energy partnering with a new entity such as the DPLA, but it represents the growing philosophical surge towards open access and information sharing. Organizational partnerships such as will prove key to the success of the DPLA, and in turn, hubs should enjoy increased discovery and access of their own materials, and I would argue, to a wider audience. While the DPLA site does not include numbers for the Getty, it does tout that Service Hubs (smaller, local contributors) like the Minnesota Digital Library reported a 55% increase in visits and 62% in unique visitors, and the Mountain West Digital Library an increase of 105% in visits and 109% in unique visitors. I would be very curious to see numbers for impact on the Content Hub’s since contributing.

Perhaps the partnership’s expansion, indicated by the 100,000 contributed records mentioned in the blog article, is proof enough of the project’s success. The article mentions the DPLA’s easy-to-use design that “makes available digital resources that would otherwise be findable only through individual institutions’ catalogues and specialized search.” It is true that despite the Getty’s experience and resources, their search interfaces leave much to be desired in terms of usability (an analysis for another class). I wonder if perusing the Getty’s annual report or strategic plan might reveal a desire to focus expenditures on other avenues, and pool resources towards support of the DPLA’s platform development?

In addition to the potential increased usage, there are other mission related reasons for the GRI/DPLA collaboration the Iris article highlights, such as a shared commitment to making cultural materials ever more widely and freely available through technology, citing the DPLA’s vision of “open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage.” The GRI also mentions the “DPLA enables novel and transformative uses of contributors’ materials by providing tools that can be used by software developers, researchers, and others to create innovative platforms for learning, tools for discovery, and other interesting applications.” It would seem the Getty’s vision recognizes the future of art and cultural heritage exists beyond the traditional walls of academia and ivory-tower scholarship. The point out that prior their contributions include some of the most frequently requested and significant material from otheir holdings such as 5,600 images from the Julius Shulman photography archive, 2,100 images from the Jacobson collection of Orientalist photography, and dozens of art dealers’ stockbooks from the Duveen and Knoedler archives. To date, the Getty has near 128,000 items, including nearly 95,000 images available via the DPLA portal.

As noted in Marty and Jones, the “ability to create digital representations of museum information resources has transformed the way users . . . work with museum collections” (p. 79). This shift from a preservation to dissemination model requires an adjustment in vision as much as strategy. In David Williams, “A Brief History of Museum Computerization,” we see how information management systems in museums have developed organically, and often siloed from their peers. Williams notes, with eery premonitory clarity, “although the need to computerize is still present, no central source yet exists to coordinate museum projects or to disseminate information” (p. 20), as if harkening to the current networked landscape. In addition, his description of the difficulties in staying abreast of user needs and expectations in an era when microcomputers were coming into vogue could be read as a harbinger to the contemporary shift to mobile technology and connectivity, with LAMs often playing catch-up in terms of system and interface design.

Museums “be responsive and relevant to the information needs of society,” (“The Museum as Information Utility,” George F. MacDonald and Stephen Alsford, p. 72). The GRI/DPLA relationship attends to this ethos in principle and practice, leveraging the strengths of each organization in efforts to maximize access—and further, maximize the quality and transformative potential of that access. Further, one could argue, the broader vision inherent to this collaboration looks to the future with the predictive energy necessary to insure continued, enhanced access to information. In a spring 2015 article for Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America exploring linked open data developments for artistic and cultural resources, author Allana Mayer notes, “large-scale initiatives such as the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) or Europeana are not just content-indexers but champions of LOD, as they create metadata schemas to which their contributing institutions must adhere and work to provide blanket interoperability and cross-collection research opportunities” (p. 7). Though, returning to the Parry readings, and the CHIN guidelines, the success of LOD efforts, much like the DPLA’s current work, is generally hindered—or at the very least, slowed—by the disparate, heterogeneous nature of cultural heritage metadata. The article on the CIDROC CRM (of which DPLA partner ARTstor’s data repository schema is based upon) would appear to offer exciting potential for mitigating these issues, but over a decade later, we are still a ways off from the landscape of mediation systems and cultural data warehouses Gill describes. The DPLA Hub Model sounds conceptually similar, but I am not sure if it was actually based upon the CIDROC CRM.

While the literature does not yet include a case study of the GRI/DPLA partnership, Lisa Gregory and Stephanie Williams of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (NCDHC) reported on their experiences with forming a DPLA Service Hub in a 2014 article for D-Lib Magazine, highlighting the reality that for many institutions, participation in such projects will necessitate a clean-up of existing metadata, including an edit for compliance with controlled vocabularies. The GRI could be seen as the ideal case study for such collaborations, considering its breadth of experience in the realm of both bibliographic control and standardization, and discovery system development and implementation—yet we are all acutely aware of the limited resources available to many cultural heritage institutions. The DPLA Hub Model is aimed at guaranteeing participation by even the smallest institutions, but the NCDHC alludes to just a few of the potential barriers and pitfalls. How can the GRI’s approach to art metadata aggregation and DPLA’s Hub model best support inclusion of smaller organizations with minimal infrastructure? Does centralizing the DPLA as the single access point essentially prevent cross-pollination and support among participants?

Outside sources:

http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/100000-digitized-art-history-materials-from-the-getty-research-institute-availble-in-dpla/

http://massappeal.com/getty-research-institute-adds-100k-archival-images-to-digital-library/

https://www.diglib.org/archives/7199/

http://www.visualconnections.com/blog/diving-into-the-dpla-getty-research-institute-adds-nearly-100000-new-items/

Lisa Gregory and Stephanie Williams,“On Being a Hub: Some Details behind Providing Metadata for the Digital Public Library of America,” D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2014. Vol 20(7/8)., North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. doi:10.1045/july2014-gregory

Allana Mayer, “Linked Open Data for Artistic and Cultural Resources,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, vol. 34 (spring 2015). 0730-7187/2015/3401-0001