A Biblio-File Brouhaha

Today (Tuesday, April 20), an international conclave of art scholars, librarians and art-history devotees is gathering at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss a pressing, if esoteric, scholarly crisis—the future of art bibliography. The discussion promises to be more stimulating and feisty than this bookish topic suggests.

The urgency of the meeting, convened by the Getty Research Institute and sponsored by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, stems from the institute's recent withdrawal of financial support for one of its programs, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). This searchable database summarizes periodicals, books and other bibliographies in about 45 languages, focusing on European and American visual art. It is the most trusted and second most used (slightly behind JSTOR) resource of its kind, according to respondents to the Getty's own 2008 user survey. But it fell victim to the budgetary crisis besetting most cultural institutions during the economic downturn.

Thomas Gaehtgens, the research institute's director since late 2007, is hoping that his decision to cut off funds for this venerable resource may yet prove to be a blessing in disguise. He envisions a new model—libraries and research institutes from around the world joining their existing research databases to "create a new world-wide network in bibliography." But for now, a research compendium painstakingly built and enriched for almost 38 years has been seriously undermined. Since December 2009, there have been no updates.

Dedicated to art scholarship, the Getty Research Institute is one of four programs (including the Getty Museum) that constitute the J. Paul Getty Trust. For the current fiscal year, the Getty's president, James Wood, instructed each program head to reduce the previous year's budget by 25%. Although the Getty's endowment as of June 30, 2009, was a superabundant $4.54 billion (down from $5.95 billion the previous year), the trust follows the fiscally prudent practice of many nonprofit organizations, limiting its spending to 5% of the average value of its endowment over three years. The one-year, 24% drop in endowment led to a similar reduction in spending, because Mr. Wood didn't deem it wise to gamble on a rapid, robust economic recovery.

The Getty's budget is $216 million this fiscal year, a $68 million reduction from last year. The savings from ending BHA's operations were relatively minor: Its annual budget was $1 million, about one-fifth of the total reduction for the research institute. A Getty spokeswoman said, however, that the cost to maintain BHA was expected to rise significantly in the future, in part because a French research institute that had been the Getty's partner in administering it had stopped contributing its half-share of money and staff.

On the plus side, the research institute has made much of BHA's database available on its Web site free of charge, whereas it was previously available only to subscribers. And it says there is more to follow. But with no further updates, this resource becomes less useful to scholars with each passing day.

"If no programs are allowed to ever die, in the end you become captive to decisions from the past," says Mr. Wood. "Every now and then . . . you've got to step back and say, 'Certain things have been very successful, but we should sunset them now.'" He added that "it's not as if we signed contracts that we were going to do it forever."

One of the precursors to BHA (known as RILA) was overseen by the College Art Association (a leading organization of artists and art scholars) with grants from nonprofit and government sources. Begun in 1972, RILA was housed at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. In 1981, the Getty took over the administration and funding of RILA at the Clark, later partnering with a French institute, CNRS/INIST, to merge content and share equal responsibility for staffing and funding. Their joint database, BHA, was first published in 1991. BHA's American office moved in 2000 from the Clark to the Getty in Los Angeles. But the French withdrew from the partnership in 2007, leaving the Getty with full responsibility for BHA's financial and operational support.

Thomas Crow, a professor at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, was director of the Getty Research Institute when BHA moved there from its longtime home at the Clark. He sees the withdrawal of support as a breach of trust.

"I regarded our commitment to [BHA's] founders and to our European partners as a solemn undertaking—a trust to be maintained in perpetuity as a fundamental support for the pursuit and sharing of new knowledge," he says. "Millions of dollars and years of work by dozens of people with deep art-history expertise have been invested in this, all of which is at risk."

The special strength of this database over others for art bibliography is the "connectivity of one article to another, made possible through the intense editorial input of the staff who have run the BHA under strict editorial guidelines," says Paul Jaskot, president of the College Art Association (CAA) and a professor of art history at DePaul University. "This depth of conceptual and editorial work is unique, in my opinion, among standard search tools."

Like many scholars and librarians who had presumed that the Getty's billions in endowment dollars meant that BHA was in strong hands, Mr. Jaskot felt blindsided by the news that the research institute was pulling the plug. In an April 2009 memo to members of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), Terence Ford, the institute's head of research databases, did warn the scholarly community that the Getty would no longer support BHA after Jan. 1. But he gave art scholars what turned out to be a false sense of security:

"The Getty is determined to find BHA . . . a good home that will provide continuing support for this uniquely valuable resource," Mr. Ford had written in that memo. "Our goal is to move it to an organization that will provide a transfer in service that subscribers may not even notice. We anticipate that . . . updates will continue in a regular way."

"Everybody stood aside and waited to see what would become of the Getty's efforts to find a new home," says Michael Rinehart, who served as the Clark's librarian from 1966 to 1986, and was RILA's editor and BHA's founding co-editor. "Only when this failed did societies like ARLIS and the CAA become activated." He argues that today's conference to discuss the future of art bibliography should have been convened by the Getty a year ago, when it could have done the most good. It might also have gotten more international participants. A Met spokeswoman told me that many expected attendees were grounded by travel disruptions caused by Iceland's volcanic eruption.

Mr. Gaehtgens counters by describing his extensive travels to find a new home for BHA among research organizations in Germany, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, England and Mexico. He also explored possible commercial buyers. No one was interested. Michael Conforti, director of the Clark, BHA's original home, says he feels "no remorse" about the bibliography's waning fortunes, because "the way in which we obtain information is very different now."

Mr. Gaehtgens also notes that the BHA is, in many ways, an imperfect instrument: "If you put my name into it, you will find only 30% of what I have published," he says. It is considerably less helpful for research on European and American art from the 19th-century onward than it is for older art, he adds. Asian, Latin American and African art are virtually ignored.

But an international database of far more ambitious size and cultural breadth is not likely to be realized anytime soon. In the meantime, the Getty's Mr. Wood says that because of the improvement in the Getty's economic fortunes, more money will be made available next year for acquisitions and "strategic initiatives."

Some of that revenue should go to resuscitating BHA.