Online Database Makes Harvard University Art Museums’ Collections Available Worldwide
Major Grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Will Fund Digitization of the Admired Asian Collections of Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum
CAMBRIDGE, MA (May 10, 2002) – The Harvard University Art Museums have today announced the launch of Collections Online a searchable Web-based database of more than 60,000 works of art from the collections of Harvard’s three art museums.
Collections Online makes it possible for scholars, researchers, and the general public to access textual information on about one-third of the Art Museums' more than 150,000 objects. Additionally, images of about 11,000 works illustrate the objects documented by the database. Eventually, records about the entire collection will be accessible online.
"One of our purposes as a teaching and research museum is to make our collections widely accessible and at the highest standard of quality possible," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "This database, with basic textual information and high-resolution images, helps us to do that."
The database can be found by visiting the Art Museums' home page at www.artmuseums.harvard.edu and clicking on Collections Online. Basic searches can be performed by the artist’s name or the title of a work. More advanced searches allow inquiries by date, object type, medium, technique, credit line, or accession number. Information available on each work includes artist, title, date, medium, dimensions, credit line, and accession number.
"It’s really a discovery tool," said Sam Quigley, director of digital information and technology for the Art Museums. "Now people can have access to information that had been available only within the Museums. It opens up our catalogue to the world."
With the launch of Collections Online at the end of April, the Harvard Art Museums joined such institutions as the National Gallery of Art (www.nga.gov) and the Tate Gallery in London (www.tate.org.uk) in providing extensive Internet access to their holdings.
Because of the way Collections Online was created, people using the database will always have access to the latest information about each work of art. Andy Gelbert, manager of application development and support, programmed the database to retrieve information directly from the Art Museums’ in-house collections management software, EmbARK. This means that any new information about a work that is entered into EmbARK by Art Museum staff will be available to the public in a timely manner.
The online database is only the most visible aspect of an institutionwide push to create a comprehensive digital record of both text and images for each of the paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and other objects owned by the Art Museums. The effort has been helped enormously by a grant of more than $750,000 from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation to catalogue, digitize, and make available via the Internet the Arthur M. Sackler Museum’s world-renowned collections of Asian art.
About the Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums are one of the world’s leading
arts institutions, with the Arthur M. Sackler, Busch-Reisinger, and Fogg
art museums, the Straus Center for Conservation, and the U.S. headquarters
for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, an excavation project in
western Turkey.
The Harvard University Art Museums are distinguished by the range and depth of their collections, their groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of their staff. As an integral part of the Harvard community, the three art museums serve as a resource for all students, adding a special dimension to their areas of study. The public is welcome to experience the collections and exhibitions as well as to enjoy lectures, symposia, and other programs.
For more than a century, the Harvard University Art Museums have been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and are renowned for their role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.
Location and Hours
The Fogg Art Museum and the Busch-Reisinger Museum are located at
32 Quincy Street in Cambridge. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum is located
next door at 485 Broadway. Each Museum is a short walk from the Harvard
Square MBTA station.
Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Sunday 1 – 5 p.m.; the Museums are closed on national holidays. Admission is $5; $4 for seniors; $3 for students; and free for those under 18 years of age. The Museums are free to everyone all day on Wednesdays and Saturday mornings, 10 a.m. until noon. The Harvard University Art Museums receive support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. More detailed information is available at 617-495-9400 or on the Internet at www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.
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