Tag Archives: art libraries

CARTA: A Collective Approach to the Preservation of Online Art Resources

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Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on the records of artists, galleries, museums, and arts organizations to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. Yet, much of the art-related materials that were once published in print form are now available primarily or solely on the web and are ephemeral by nature. In response to this challenge, more than 40 art libraries, museums, and organizations from across the United States and Canada have partnered with Internet Archive to establish a collective approach to the preservation of web-based art content at scale: The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA).

Since 2018, members of CARTA have worked together to identify, preserve, and provide access to at-risk online content related to the arts. The program relies on the expertise of those working in art libraries and museums by asking them to nominate sites for inclusion in the archive. Internet Archive web archivists then work to capture the sites and make the preserved content available in the CARTA collections portal.

Sumitra Duncan, Head of the Web Archiving Program at the New York Art Resources Consortium/The Frick Collection, was one of the founding program members and currently serves as the CARTA Advisory Board Chair. In speaking about the program, she reflected “It’s been tremendous to see what we’ve all been able to achieve together with CARTA in just a few years of working collaboratively, with over 40 member organizations having contributed. This work isn’t as easily accomplished alone (especially for those who are part of a small museum staff, face shrinking budgets for subscriptions, or are the solo archivist/librarian at their organization), so CARTA has allowed many art library colleagues to join the effort and share their expertise for collection development to ensure that these ephemeral materials are being preserved before disappearing from the live web.” 

Image from Galeria Superficie art gallery website, contributed by NYARC.
See more of the archived website here.

While CARTA is a member-supported program, mission-aligned organizations experiencing financial constraints may apply to join through the Sponsored Membership Program. One of CARTA’s sponsored members is the American Craft Council, a nonprofit organization that celebrates the history, practice, and unique storytelling of American craftwork. “I was very happy to be invited back to join CARTA as a sponsored member,” said Beth Goodrich, Archivist at the American Craft Council. “It was very important to me to see that the field of craft is recognized and reflected in the archival record of art in America and around the world.”

Image from Patti Warashina’s artist website, contributed by the American Craft Council.
See more of the archived website here.

Each CARTA member brings their own unique expertise to the program, often contributing nominations connected to the regions, styles, and media represented in their institution’s collections. Marie Chant, Digital Archivist at the Museum of Glass, explained “Museum of Glass has been digitally documenting vibrant and innovative glass artists in our state-of-the-art Hot Shop for over twenty years. Joining CARTA was a natural next step for our work and will help further support our collection of born-digital glass art documentation. We are excited to work with the Internet Archive and other CARTA institutions committed to preserving significant web-based contemporary art resources for generations to come.” 

In addition to nonprofit organizations and museums, CARTA’s membership also includes university art libraries. One of these contributors is Kristy Waller, Archivist at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. “Emily Carr University (ECU) was pleased to be selected to participate in CARTA as a sponsored member and we are excited to contribute Canadian art and design content. ECU supports both emerging and established artists by documenting arts education and practice through its websites and resources. We tried to crawl these sites manually using open-source tools, but arts content is often complicated and media heavy, making this work unsustainable on our budget. Through our involvement in CARTA, we are able to preserve content for the ECU community and beyond; as well as collaborate with local arts organizations to nominate artist-run centres and artists’ web sites – always with the goal of increasing meaningful access to arts content for future researchers.”

Image from Intuition Commons artist website, contributed by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
See more of the archived website here.

As the CARTA collections and membership continue to grow, collaborators are pursuing more opportunities to preserve and provide access to art resources from communities and organizations across the world. “I’m very grateful to CARTA members and the Internet Archive staff for their dedication and shared vision for the success and continued growth of this program via coordinated collaboration,” said Duncan. “I’m excited to see how we can further get the word out about the wonderful resources we have within the CARTA collections and to recruit additional members to the CARTA cohort who can bring unique perspectives to subject areas not yet represented by the sites we’ve archived thus far.” 

“CARTA is transformative in the realm of preserving web-based art history,” said Heather Slania, who began her involvement with the program while working at the Maryland Institute College of Art and now serves as the Chief Librarian of the National Gallery of Art. “Its collaborative nature is vital for managing the vast and interconnected art world. I strongly encourage large and small institutions to join this essential endeavor. By contributing to CARTA, you are preserving art information and ensuring that future generations have a rich and diverse understanding of today’s art landscape.”

Learn more about the CARTA program, explore the CARTA collections portal, or reach out to the CARTA program team for more information.

24 Arts Organizations join the Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA)

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Earlier this summer, the Internet Archive announced its partnership with the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) to form a collaborative, web-based art resources preservation and access initiative. We are now thrilled to announce that the initiative has kicked off with a diverse roster of 24 participating member institutions throughout the United States and Canada.

The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) project has a mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to vital arts content from the web by supporting a vibrant, growing collaboration of art and museum libraries. With funding from federal agencies and foundations, the Internet Archive is able to expand CARTA to a diverse set of museums and art libraries worldwide and to broaden the ways the resulting collections can be discovered and used both by scholar and patrons.

The arts institutions actively participating in this program so far include:

  • American Craft Council
  • American Folk Art Museum
  • ART | library deco
  • Art Gallery of Ontario
  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Fashion Institute of Technology
  • Getty Research Institute (Getty Library)
  • Harvard University – Fine Arts Library
  • Harvard University – Graduate School of Design
  • Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields
  • Leonardo/ISAST
  • Maryland Institute College of Art
  • Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia
  • National Gallery of Art Library
  • National Gallery of Canada
  • New York Art Resources Consortium
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  • Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library
  • The Corning Museum of Glass
  • The Menil Collection
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Spencer Reference Library
  • University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hamilton Library

Membership in the program includes national and regional art and museum libraries throughout the United States and Canada committed to the preservation of 21st century art historical resources on the web. One of our early supporters and current CARTA member Amelia Nelson, Director of Library and Archives at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, noted the increased risk of losing art history on the web in comparison to earlier generations of artists: “Websites are the letters, exhibition postcards, exhibition reviews and newspaper articles of today’s artists and artistic communities, but they aren’t resources that scholars can find in archives like the physical materials that document the careers of earlier generations of artists. I worry that as we lose these sites, we are also losing the potential for scholars to place this moment in the canon of art history and culture broadly. This initiative will build a collaborative and sustainable way for art libraries to pool their limited resources, with the technical, administrative, and organizational expertise of the Internet Archive, to ensure that this content is available for future generations.”

The initial group of member institutions have identified an initial set of more than 150 valuable and at-risk websites, articles, and other materials on five primary collection topics: Local Arts Organizations; Artists Websites; Art Galleries; Auction Houses (Catalogs/Price Lists); and Art Criticism.  These collections will continue to grow and evolve over the course of the project, capturing thousands of websites and many terabytes of data. 

Untitled Art website, nominated by NYARC for inclusion in the CARTA Art Fairs and Events collection.

We’re actively seeking more US-based arts institutions to participate in the project as we continue to grow our collections of web-based art history resources. Collaborative members attend meetings every two months to coordinate curation and other group activities as well as participate in subcommittees focused on collection development, metadata, end-user/researcher engagement, and outreach. If you are involved with an art and/or museum library interested in joining this collaborative project, please complete this form.

Internet Archive Launches Collaborative, Web-Based Art Resources Preservation and Access Initiative

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Much of the art gallery, artist, and arts organization materials that were once published in print form are now available primarily or solely on the web. These groups, like many in the cultural sector, have also been hit especially hard by the global pandemic, making their web presences particularly at-risk of being lost if they are not proactively collected and preserved.The creation of reference and research resources that promote streamlined access and enable new types of scholarly use will ensure that the art historical record of the 21st century, and especially of our current global pandemic, is readily accessible far into the future.

For this reason, the Internet Archive, along with the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), are pleased to announce our project Consortial Action to Preserve Born-Digital, Web-Based Art History & Culture. The project recently received a two-year, $305,343 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities. This award will support the formation of a cooperative group of 30+ art and museum libraries from across the United States to collaborate on the preservation of, and access to vital arts content from the web. 

The Internet Archive has a long history of building and supporting collaborative communities and providing non-profit web, preservation, and access services to cultural heritage organizations. The multi-institutional initiative between Internet Archive, NYARC, and other arts and museum organizations will build on similar community-based archiving and professional cultivation projects in the Community Programs group, especially our Community Webs program, currently expanding nationally and internationally. Community Webs has received funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and IMLS to provide public libraries and cultural heritage organizations with services, training, and professional development opportunities to document their diverse local history. 

NYARC are pioneers in collaborative web archiving and shared services, among art and museum libraries. NYARC’s robust web archive collections encompass art resources, artists’ websites, auction catalogs, catalogues raisonnes, and hundreds of New York City gallery websites. The Internet Archive and NYARC have partnered on work to build born-digital collecting capacity among arts organizations in the past, most recently in the IMLS-funded Advancing Art Libraries and Curated Web Archives National forum and related events.  Through discussions, workshops and roadmapping sessions with leaders in art and museum libraries, a strategy and plan  towards an inclusive, sustainable, cooperative approach to collecting and stewarding born-digital, locally-focused art history collection was developed, forming the basis of this broader cooperative effort.

Members in the project’s preliminary group of art and museum libraries will select topics and specific web content that is relevant to their expertise, will provide metadata to facilitate access to archived content, and will participate in planning and evaluation meetings, all while curating a valuable reference resource that will enhance their traditional collecting areas. The Internet Archive will coordinate communications, facilitate governance and collective curatorial activities, provide technical digital library and archive services, and help enable members to build and maintain discovery and access platforms, as well as facilitate researcher use of the collections resulting from the group’s work.

If your art or museum library is interested in joining this collaborative effort, please fill out this participation form by July 31 to join us! 

Internet Archive and New York Art Resources Consortium Receive Grant for a National Forum to Advance Web Archiving in Art and Museum Libraries

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We are pleased to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has recently awarded a collaborative grant to the New York Art Resources Consortium and our Archive-It group to host a national forum event, along with associated workshops and stakeholder meetings, to catalyze collaboration among art libraries in the stewardship of historically valuable art-related materials published on the web. The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries and archives of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. Archive-It is the web archiving service of the Internet Archive that works with hundreds of heritage organizations, including an international set of museums and art libraries, to preserve and provide access to web-published resources. Archive-It and NYARC will jointly run the project, Advancing Art Libraries and Curated Web Archives: A National Forum.

This National Leadership Grant in the Curating Collections program category to conduct a National Forum and affiliated meetings builds on NYARC’s and Archive-It’s work together expanding web archiving amongst art and museum libraries and archives, including through the ARLIS/NA Web Archiving Special Interest Group, as well as their individual efforts to advance born-digital collection building. In Reframing Collections for the Digital Age, NYARC focused on web archiving program development, including technical work to integrate Archive-It and its discovery services that can inform work in similar institutions. Archive-It, with its Community Webs program, is working with dozens of public libraries on cohort building, educational resources, and network development supporting community history web archiving — a model that can be adopted by the national art library community to scale out its coordinated efforts. In addition, Archive-It has led, and NYARC operationalized, collaborative efforts towards joint API-based systems integrations research and development to further joint services and interoperability. 

By mobilizing a broad effort through an invitational forum, the project aims to achieve national scale through network building and shared infrastructure planning that the project team will foster through a program of discussion, training, and strategic roadmapping. The project will include the contribution of a diverse group of members of the art library community, lead to published outputs on strategic directions and community-specific training materials, and launch a multi-institutional effort to scale the extent of web-published, born-digital materials preserved and accessible for art scholarship and research. Thank you to IMLS for their continued support of work advancing web archiving and the overall national digital platform initiative.