Born of an idea by scholar Silvia Ginzburg, the ARTchives project involves the Biblioteca Hertziana, Fondazione Federico Zeri, Getty Research Institute, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Università di Roma 3.
The novelty of the project lies not just in creating the first census among personal art historical collections, but in the way this will be performed. Data will be collected by an already up-and-running web application that exploits semantic web technology and handles cataloguing and publication based on the following principles:
RE-USE
Uploaded into the system are a number of open-format datasets available on the Web, supplied by Wikidata, Open Library and Getty vocabularies. The principle entails exploiting work done by other institutions for time-saving reasons, but also to render the data from already existing resources more inter-compatible in future.
DATA ENHANCEMENT
Likewise with text fields uploaded from outside and compiled by the cataloguer, it will be possible to automatically extract keywords and other significant information which the compiler may preserve or reject.
ACCURACY
The fact that in most cases the compiler will only have suggestions to accept will ensure that data are normalised and aligned properly right from the insertion stage, thus requiring less supervision and realignment.
CONSISTENCY
Before being published, data will be checked by a reviser, again ensuring their accuracy and consistency.
VISIBILITY
Data will not just be published on the ARTchives website. Those that are significant will all be released in open format, thus contributing to Wikidata.
The project is currently testing application and implementation of the database.