CAA News

CAA learned last week, through the Art History Newsletter, that the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is withdrawing the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) from distribution on March 31, 2010. With the closing, hundreds of thousands of records and abstracts in the database will soon be unavailable to scholars worldwide—indefinitely.

Subscribers to BHA, which include many academic libraries and research institutions, received notice about the shutdown from the Getty earlier this month. While there are some alternatives—among them Art Index, Avery Index, and ARTbibliographies Modern—the loss of this invaluable resource is immense and will be deeply felt throughout the international art-history community. Indeed, BHA’s “coverage has not been duplicated in any single database available to us,” writes Jill E. Luedke, a librarian and art-subject specialist at Temple University.

Since June CAA has made numerous communiqués by phone and email to the Getty regarding the demise of BHA, receiving only one inconclusive response. From what CAA can gather from other sources, the closure appears to be strictly a budgetary decision. The Getty attempted to find an organization that would purchase the database and software program that they had developed, but found none. CAA was not privy to the negotiations to find a buyer.

As the world’s most comprehensive bibliographic database of publications in art history, BHA covers the visual arts in Europe and America from late antiquity to the present. Copublished with the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique in France, BHA originated in part as the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA), created in 1972 under the auspices of CAA and supported by grants from public endowments and private foundations. The Getty’s bibliography includes RILA records from 1972 to 1989 and those from the Repertory of Art and Archaeology (RAA) from 1973 to 1989, and had been growing ever since.

Michael Rinehart, formerly editor in chief of RILA and BHA for nearly thirty years, wrote in 2009: “It is highly unlikely that any commercial vendor will want to maintain it. It is equally clear that the Getty intends to end BHA with or without a plan for its continuation…. Whatever the original understanding between the CAA and the Getty may have been, it is self-evident that the CAA entrusted RILA to the Getty in the expectation that it would continue.”

Art historians and researchers were first alerted to the possible closure in June 2009, and CAA published a response at that time. The Getty released a statement in the same month, but negotiations with other organizations, as noted above, failed to produce a solution to keep BHA alive.

The CAA Member Directory, now available online to current individual members, allows you to search for other members internationally. Search criteria include first and last name, organization or institution name, and city, state, and country. Those fields—as well as telephone number, email address, and website—are shown in your search results, unless an individual has opted out of the directory.

To review and update your contact information, including that which appears in the Member Directory, please log into your CAA account. Next, click the “Contact Info” link on the left side to review your contact information. Instructions on the page will help you choose an address for the Member Directory. You may prevent any information from appearing in the directory at any time by unchecking the “Directory” box for all addresses on your record.

If you have more than one valid address on your record, please choose which address to include in the directory. Organization and title will only be included with a business address. In addition, only your primary phone, email, and/or website address will be used regardless of which address you choose. You may also remove duplicate or outdated information.

Questions about the Member Directory? Please email CAA Member Services.

The Getty Research Institute just published a statement on its website regarding the future of the Bibliography on the History of Art (BHA, also known as the International Bibliography of Art, or IBA). The statement appears in full below:

In response to current economic conditions, the J. Paul Getty Trust recently announced it will significantly reduce its 2010 fiscal year budget. This will have an impact on all of the Getty’s operations, including the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Since news of the Getty’s budget reduction became public, including information about the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), we have received some inquiries about the BHA’s future. We thought it would be helpful to review the history of the Getty’s involvement with the BHA, the current status of the database, and our expectations for its future.

From 1990, when the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA) and the Répertoire d’Art et d’Archéologie (RAA) came together to form BHA, it was a joint project between the Getty and the major database producer, the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique-CNRS. At the end of 2007, this collaboration ceased and BHA formally came to an end. Since January 2008, the GRI has continued production of the database on its own, under the name of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), and over the last sixteen months, the GRI has made an effort to forge collaborative partnerships on the IBA both nationally and internationally.

While there is interest in seeing the database continue, there have been no formal partnership commitments and no guarantees of outside funding for the project. Unfortunately, with the GRI facing severe budget challenges and without strong and committed partners to share the work, it has become impossible for the Getty to maintain the IBA on its own. Nevertheless, the GRI continues to be interested in seeing the IBA continue its service to the art historical field.

In the near term, the IBA will continue its work, and the first of three updates to the database will be on June 30, 2009. This update will include new data (IBA), and all of the past data of BHA and RILA. It will not contain RAA. This June 30 update will also include the updates from December 31, 2008 and March 31, 2009, which were delayed for technical reasons. All subscribers will also receive scheduled updates on September 30, and December 31, 2009.

Beginning January 1, 2010, the Getty will no longer support the ongoing IBA. We are hopeful that by this time the IBA will be transferred to an organization that can provide continuing support for this valuable resource. Our goal is to move the BHA/IBA to an organization that will provide a transfer in service smooth enough that subscribers may not even notice. We are hopeful that the same distributors will be used after January 1, 2010, and that updates will continue in a regular way.

We will keep the art historical community informed as this process develops. At this time, we would like to express our gratitude to the art reference librarians, art historians, and graduate students whose support has sustained RILA/BHA/IBA for over 29 years. We look forward to your continued support during this period of transition.

Last week CAA published a short statement addressing its concerns about this invaluable database for academic research in the visual arts.

Like many of our art colleagues and allied academic and cultural institutions in the field, the College Art Association is deeply concerned about the status of the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). CAA continues to communicate with the Getty Research Institute (copublisher of the BHA, along with the French Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) about the future of the BHA and how this vital bibliographic resource can be maintained. We will do what we can as necessary to secure its longevity once we have had our inquiries answered by the Getty.