Digitization of Early Auction Catalogs
The Frick Art Reference Library announces its partnership with Brill/IDC Publishers to digitize c. 3,300 auction catalogues from its notable historical collections and make them available in Art Sales Catalogues Online (ASCO). The Frick is the first library in North America to join Brill’s cooperative effort to build a complete corpus of auction sale catalogs from the period 1600 to 1900. Initially based on Répertoire des Catalogues de Ventes Publiques intéressant l'Art ou la Curiosité (4 vols., La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1938-1987), a finding aid for auction catalogues from the period 1600 to 1925 by renowned scholar Frits Lugt, ASCO now includes many additional catalogues not documented in the Lugt publication. Catalogues that will be included from the Frick are not widely held in other library collections. Their addition to ASCO will augment the 29,709 catalogues currently accessible in ASCO.
Auction catalogues of previous centuries offer one of the most important resources for the study of the history of collecting, as well as a primary means of establishing a work of art's history and provenance. Due to the rarity of many historical catalogues, access by researchers was difficult. ASCO now brings together a large trove of digital facsimiles that together present a full history of sales of works of art at auction. The Frick’s catalogues will be digitized directly from the print copy in full color. Full-text searching using OCR is in development. The digitization of the original materials held at the Frick will offer researchers optimal access to the catalogues, while also making a significant contribution to their conservation. The c. 3,300 catalogues from the Frick will be added in yearly installments in the coming five years. The first installment of c. 700 catalogues is expected by early 2013.
Arcade in Artlibraries.net
Arcade, the online catalog of the Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is now searchable through Artlibraries.net--Virtual Catalogue for Art History.
Artlibraries.net, formerly known as the Virtueller Katalog Kunstgeschichte (VKK), provides access to more than 8 million bibliographic records from a community of institutions located around the world for periodicals, conference papers, festschriften, auction catalogs, exhibition catalogs, and much more.
Arcade is one of only three United States library catalogs included in this international search portal for the discovery of art resources. The generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made the participation of Arcade in artlibraries.net possible.
Artnet.com: Price Database for Decorative Art
The Frick Art Reference Library now has access to the Artnet.com: Price Database for decorative art. This database acts as a complement to the Artnet.com: Price Database for fine art and design, which the Library has subscribed to for a number of years. The decorative art database contains auction results for the decorative arts from 2002 to the present. It is available on site at the Library.
Private Art Dealers Association 2008 Annual Grant
The Private Art Dealers Association (PADA) announced the Frick Art Reference Library as the recipient of the 2008 PADA Annual Grant. The grant will be used to establish a book fund in honor of Patricia Barnett, retired Andrew W. Mellon Librarian at the Frick Art Reference Library.
Macbeth Gallery Exhibition Catalogs Digitized
Digitized full-text copies of 455 Macbeth Gallery exhibition catalogs are now available in FRESCO. The project was funded and coordinated by the Thomas J. Watson Library of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The full-text catalogs represent the combined collections of the Frick Art Reference Library and the Thomas J. Watson Library.
Cicognara Library
The Library is proud to announce the addition of several thousand records to FRESCO for the titles included in the Cicognara Library, which is now part of the Vatican Library in Rome. In 1824, Conte Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) donated his library of mainly art and archaeology texts, dating from the beginning of printing to the early nineteenth century, to the Vatican Library. A joint project between the Vatican Library and the University of Illinois is approaching the end of a multi-year project to make available the approximately 5,000 volumes of his library on microfiche. The full text of the titles published on microfiche is available in the Reading Room at the Library. Access to the items in the collection was previously limited to an index Cicognara published in 1821. With funding from the Kress Foundation, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, recently completed a cataloging project to create online records for the titles included in the Cicognara microfiche collection. These records have been uploaded into FRESCO, allowing researchers at the Frick Art Reference Library to easily identify texts in this collection and to examine the full text of these titles on microfiche.
Center for the History of Collection in America
The Frick Collection announces plans to establish a Center for the History of Collecting in America, to be located at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York. With a planning grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Frick Collection has an opportunity to create an institutional base for expanding and nurturing this burgeoning field, with particular emphasis on collecting in America.
JSTOR
The Frick Art Reference Library is happy to announce the availability on site of JSTOR's Arts & Sciences III Collection database. JSTOR's Arts & Sciences III Collection offers full-text access to archived back issues of periodicals dealing with art, art history, architecture, architectural history, music, film studies, folklore, language, literature, performing arts, philosophy, and religion. Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, October, Gesta, Journal of Architectural Historians, Metropolitan Museum Journal, and Women’s Art Journal are some of the titles available.
Points of View: The Power of Art Journalism
If newspapers are the first draft of history, it follows that art journals are the first draft of art history. With more than 2,500 journals covering topics ranging from practical advice on design trends to loftier grapplings with aesthetics, the periodical collection of the Frick Art Reference Library captures the interest of specialists in all fields of the arts. This is the first Web version of the regularly scheduled exhibitions in the Library.
ARTstor
The ARTstor image database is now available ON SITE at the Frick Art Reference Library. ARTstor provides curated collections of art images and associated data for noncommercial and scholarly, non-profit educational use. More than 300,000 images are currently available, with plans to add 200,000 more images by the end of the year. ARTstor provides storage space for creating personally tailored collections of images as well as an online and offline image viewer that allows for the detailed examination of images with unique zoom capabilities. Images not from ARTstor can be added to presentations using its offline image viewer and images from ARTstor can be added to presentations using other software (e.g. Microsoft PowerPoint). Individual registration, free of charge, is required to access all options. Requires download to use and access the offline image viewer.
New Version of FRESCO with Auction Catalogs
Records for the renowned collection of more than 74,000 auction sales catalogs held by the Frick Art Reference Library are now available in FRESCO (Frick Research Catalog Online). The FRESCO interface has been redesigned to allow users to search the entire collection of materials or to search just the auction catalogs held by the Library. The SCIPIO: Art and Rare Book Sales Catalogs database, also available on site at the Library, complements the auction sales catalogs records listed in FRESCO by providing information on the auction sales catalogs holdings of other research institutions.
Art Sales Catalogues Online
Searchable database version of Frits Lugt's Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques for the years 1600-1900, available on site at the Frick Art Reference Library. Includes additions and corrections of the original publication. Lists auction sales catalogs holdings for the Frick Art Reference Library and other institutions. Allows FULL TEXT access to a number of auction sales catalogs listed in the database.
Digital Project for Endangered Negatives
(Pforzheimer/NYT, 2004-7)
In order to realize its long-term commitment of providing a digital surrogate for its million-plus image Photoarchive, the Library has begun the process of digitizing its collection of 60,000 negatives. In 2003, a four-year project commenced to convert 5,000 of the most endangered of these negatives and their accompanying documentation to digital form. This project, generously underwritten by the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation and The New York Times Company Foundation, will ensure that images of unpublished works of art, uniquely recorded by the Library’s spoiling negatives, will be available for researchers of future generations.
Digital Project for Endangered Sansoni and Cooper Negatives
(ARTstor, 2005-7)
Shortly after beginning the Pforzheimer Project, the Library signed an agreement with ARTstor to digitize more of its negatives. An independent not-for-profit organization spearheaded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARTstor embraces an over-arching objective of offering worldwide access to a digital databank of images for teachers and researchers in the history of art as well as other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With funding from ARTstor, the Library is digitizing all of its negatives from Mario Sansoni’s photographing campaigns in Italy, as well as the photographs of lots offered for sale at Sotheby’s and Christie’s taken by the London-based firm A.C. Cooper between 1922 and 1937. In all, the project will result in digital access to nearly 20,000 images and accompanying documentation on works of art that have rarely, if ever, been published.
 Return to top
|
