Getty Visit

Recently, I was in Los Angeles to attend and present at a regional meeting.

While I was at this meeting, on Thursday, November 17th, I visited the
J. Paul Getty Trust (http://www.getty.edu/) in Los Angeles, primarily to
visit with systems folk there, but also to investigate possibilities of
using the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) that the Getty produces, and
which the ND Art Image Library has used as its artist name authority
source for their slide collection.  The ULAN is available online at
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/ulan/
Denise Massa has expressed the need to continue using this resource for
name authority once the collection moves to Digitool, so I wanted to
investigate the options for integrating this resource into Digitool's
workflow.

The name authority is important, as artists in antiquity may have been
referred to in multiple ways.  See, for example, Leonardo da Vinci
(http://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?find=da+vinci%2C+leonardo&role=&nation=&prev_page=1&subjectid=500010879).
This lists not only the name variants, but also the other roles he took
historically other than as a painter.

My idea for using this within Digitool would be to load this into Aleph
as a new authority file (NDU11, for example), and then connect to this
database via Z39.50 through the Meditor.  While creating new descriptive
records for digitized images, the idea is that we could query and insert
the preffered name, as well as variants, into the descriptive record.
From the Digitool training we had here about a month ago, we do know
that we can connect to Z39.50 databases within the Meditor, but need to
investigate more specifically how this would be accomplished.  This is a
separate issue, which I will not go into much detail here yet, but will
begin investigating.

I met with Murtha Baca, who manages the Vocabulary, Standards, and
Digital Resource Management program within the Getty Research
Institute.  The ULAN, which is comprised of 262,000 artist names and
variant names, is currently available as XML, relational table, and MARC
formats.  The ULAN is going through its annual update, with the
refreshed version available sometime in January, according to Murtha.
There is a small licensing fee of approximately $650/year for
educational institutions.  I asked Murtha if a single license would
permit downloads of multiple formats of the same resource.  She is going
to check and get back to me on this.  If we were able to download both
the MARC and XML versions of this, we could incorporate the MARC version
as an authority file for staff workflow use, and use the XML version to
provide enhanced browse/resource discovery in the user interface as well.

The ULAN is updated once per year.  Updates are not available
separately; one has to reload the complete file periodically to get all
of the updates.  I don't think this would need to be done every year,
perhaps every 2-3 years.  We would need to see the extent of the changes
in any given year to have a better idea of this.

The next step is to investigate and assess the feasibility of loading
this data into Aleph, making it availabile as a Z39.50-accessible
database to Digitool, and then utilizing this within the Meditor
workflow.  If this is feasible, we still need to load some sample
records, try this out, and see what value-added having the ULAN records
available from within Meditor is.

Questions and comments most welcome!

 - Pascal Calarco