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History of Art Bibliography

About

The website OpenBibArt - A century of western bibliography on art history allows the user to query more than 1.2 million bibliographic records summarizing literature in the fields of art historical and archaeological research published between 1910 and 2007. When possible, links to full-text sources are provided.

In accordance with France’s Open Science Policy, data on this website is in open access, for all audiences under a CC BY 4.0 license.

 

History
OpenBibArt - A century of western bibliography on art history aggregates the records of four related databases:

  • The Répertoire d’Art et d’Archéologie – RAA – a bibliographic publication, published from 1910 to 1972 under the direction of INHA’s Library of the National Institute of Art History and subsequently by the CNRS, providing descriptions of articles, monographs and sales catalogs from many countries,
  • The Répertoire d’Art et d’Archéologie – RAA – containing all records for the same publications as above, and managed by Inist-CNRS from 1973 to 1990,
  • The Répertoire International de la littérature de l’art / International Repertory of the Literature of Art – RILA – an abstracting and indexing service for the literature of art history created in 1975 by the Clark Art Institute and co-sponsored from 1982 to 1989 by the Getty Trust, which assumed full sponsorship in 1990,
  • The Bibliography of the History of Art – BHA – a cooperative venture of Inist-CNRS and the Getty Research Institute, from 1990 to 2007.

 

Project motivation and outcome
Between 2009-2021, the four databases were only available in various configurations on three different platforms :

  • RAA (records through 1972) on INHA’s Agorha platform
  • BHA and RAA (from 1973) on the OpenBibArt platform developed by Inist-CNRS
  • BHA and RILA on the Getty Research Institute website

However, none of these platforms provided access to all four databases.

OpenBibArt - A century of western bibliography on art history is a new website developed to facilitate research and access to all four databases simultaneously.

 

Features
Bilingual interface: French and English.

Three search modes: simple, advanced and expert. A query builder facilitates the formulation of complex queries.

The historic BHA thesauri (BHA Authorities) were originally created by the Gettyindependently of the Getty Vocabularies. Where possible, historic BHA Authority terms have been aligned with Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (GN).

The six BHA thesauri may be consulted to identify and link to controlled vocabulary terms used in bibliographic records. Alternately one can search by the same terms listed within the records. Various filters allow one to refine one’s results.

In some cases, artist names are enriched through links to the corresponding records in Agorha (INHA), BNF, Dbpedia, Library of Congress, ISNI, Getty Research Institute, Idref and Wikidata.

 

Export formats
The website offers export of records in Extended MODS, Dublin Core and RIS formats. A summary text list of short records is also available.

 

Technical Aspects
OpenBibArt - A century of western bibliography on art history was designed and produced by Inist-CNRS. It is based on “VIBAD” (Visualisation Indexation de Bases Documentaires/Visualization and Indexing of Documentary Databases) a fully configurable platform, designed in coordination with the search engine, Elasticsearch.

It is an adaptive website, compliant with “responsive web design” allowing easy reading and navigation on any device

Metadata is expressed in the Library of Congress Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) format, adapted and extended by Inist-CNRS to include metadata not covered by the format.

The “communication” area of the website utilizes the open-source content management system, WordPress.