Auction Catalogs
Introduction and BackgroundJSTOR is collaborating with the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a pilot project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to understand how auction catalogs can be best preserved for the long term and made most easily accessible for scholarly use. Auction catalogs are vital for provenance research as well as for the study of art markets and the history of collecting. Libraries, however, face a range of challenges with respect to their catalog collections, including preservation concerns and shelf space constraints. This pilot project will digitize and preserve a small set of auction catalogs dating from the 18th through the early 20th century, while examining how best a more extensive effort might be undertaken. To enhance access to content, JSTOR is developing new tools for digitization, such as capturing handwritten annotations that document the lots’ buyers and prices. New tools linking resources and allowing authorized users to contribute information will provide opportunities to enhance content.
Description The catalogs are vital for research into the provenance and attribution of particular art works, the creation of catalogue raisonnés, as a source for high-quality images, the study of art markets and the history of taste and collecting, and as a window into historical events such as the Great Depression and World War II that led to the dissolution of households. Both the Frick and the Met note that their patrons use their catalogs on a daily basis. Preservation of their older and rarer print copies is also a major issue. Interest among scholars in these materials is quite high, but allowing much circulation of them is, of course, a risk and inevitably accelerates the deterioration of the artifact. While catalogs that date back to the 18th Century tend to be in good condition, thanks to superior paper quality, those from the 19th through early 20th Centuries are deteriorating relatively quickly because of the less expensive acidic paper they were printed on. Digitized, the auction catalogs would be more valuable to their current users. As few catalogs before the mid-20th Century are indexed, the ability to conduct a full-text search would “unlock” content that is currently difficult to find. Also, an online environment would create new opportunities to associate the catalogs with relevant material. For instance, descriptions of art objects could be linked to photographs of those objects across a range of resources, such as ArtSTOR and Google Images. For the catalogs that have been indexed, links could be enabled from databases such as SCIPIO (an online union catalog of auction catalog records) to the full text. Getty’s Provenance Index, which tracks the provenance of art items from 1640-1850, could also link to the relevant catalogs. Further, in certain subfields, such as African and Oceanic art, catalogs are repositories of significant scholarship and are a necessary supplement to the sparse journal coverage. Advanced Technology Research JSTOR’s advanced technology research team are investigating data, text and image analyisis, this research will feed into:
Linking The identification of keywords will be used to search other databases to find further information to associate with the objects. For example further information on an artwork may be found in ArtSTOR, or a books full text may be available in Google books. These would be easily identifiable though automated searches. The identified items (keywords, entities and so on) will then be included in the metadata of the objects so at runtime links will be generated to identify relevant resources. Annotations Some of the most important pieces of information in the action catalog are recorded by hand as annotations on the physical material, these annotations will include such information as the sale price of the piece described. A method will identify this information where it exists, and associate it with the relevant sales lot and determine the text conveyed in the annotation. The handwriting, especially in older materials, is difficult to correctly interpret, but, even if the results from this analysis are not one hundred percent correct the information can then be provided as a ‘best guess’ of the text of the written annotations – these ‘best guesses’ can then be updated and corrected by the community via the community knowledge tools. Community Editing A community editing tool is being developed that will enable scholars to proof read, upload and annotate information about particular catalog records. The community will be made up of different levels of user. These users will be able to interact with the system in different ways. There would be a anonymous user, able to view the content but not add their knowledge, a community member who may view content, edit content and vote, and an administrator who may leave comments, additional links, corrections to annotations or other data and vote with a higher weight (more than one vote). To become a more involved member the user would need to be voted in by other members.
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