The Art Institute of Chicago spearheaded this project with assistance from the Getty Foundation. The catalogue includes five pages worth of authors and contributors, including categories for digital production, editorial production, and imaging production. The general editors were Senior Curator Gloria Groom and Jill Shaw, a former Research Associate, both from the Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture. From the digital production team, Elizabeth Neely and D. Samuel Quigley both received praise from the museum director, Douglas Druick, as he called their contributions “vital.” In the end, over 50 contributed to this large-scale project.
The Art Institute created this project because they wanted a digitally accessible, academically rigorous catalogue of their Monet collection. They wanted a digital edition because print catalogues are cost prohibitive, have only a “modest” circulation, and cannot be updated. The Art Institute’s goal in an online catalogue was to provide an accessible, free catalogue with the same “academic rigor, curatorial insight, and editorial professionalism” as printed versions. Their intended audience for this project is primarily scholars, and secondly possible users from the museum website. So, they wanted the catalog to meet the standards of an academic research source. Concerning a Scheinfeldt argument, this project was not necessarily made to answer a specific question. But it provides detailed information about the artworks which promote scholarly research and can be used as a reliable source to answer specific questions.
The sources for this project include images, text, and various documents. These sources were organized and edited, processed through ChicagoCodeX (CCX) and OSCI Toolkit. OSCI Toolkit is a “publishing environment for online catalogues with full scholarly apparatus” and CCX is a collection of software that works with such a digital publishing platform as it provides book-like navigation, complex presentation of multilayered images, and annotation tools for readers. The online catalogue presents the material in a web-accessible manner, with various interactive attributes like zooming in on images, or making personalised annotations. The Art Institute wanted the catalogue to have all of the benefits of a print catalogue, but with the addition of features that are only possible online, such as the zoom feature. With OSCI Toolkit, the raw data is kept separate from its presentation, which allows the museum to to change its presentation without re-entering data.
This project did not have a specific conclusion in the argument sense. Instead, the end result is a functioning catalogue available for public use. The project began in 2010 and was completed in 2014. It is likely this project took a great deal of time to complete, judging by the sheer scale of the project and amount of contributors. This project encourages discovering the Art Institute’s Monet collection, as it makes the works browsable. This browsability also encourages comparison. The project enables annotation, as users can easily create their own annotations, and research as its citation feature makes reference simple, while maintaining academic standards.
The primary strength of this catalogue as a digital humanities project is its thoroughness. For each entry there is an image, curatorial entry, technical report, provenance, exhibition list, selected references, and other pertinent documentation. It is an excellent academic resource, which is free and easily accessible, thus meeting the Institute’s goals. The weaknesses of this project are that it crashes frequently and can be difficult to load. I think that is due to the sheer volume of data this catalogue processes.
