(15 June 2016) Marking the occasion of its four-year anniversary, the Getty Research Portal has been rebuilt and redesigned, making it easier to explore the digitized literature of art history. The Portal is a catalog providing free access to books and journals made available online by contributing institutions.
A project of the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and founding members—which include some of the world’s major art libraries—the Portal began in the early summer of 2012. In assembling a virtual corpus of digitized texts on art, architecture, material culture, and related fields from numerous partners, the Portal aspires to offer a more expansive collection than any single library could provide. Furthermore, with these freely downloadable materials, scholars and researchers can now be in possession of copies of rare books and other titles without having to travel to far-flung locales.
The Portal’s redesign was prompted in part by the desire to improve the user experience for researchers utilizing the site and to provide better navigation when sifting through results. Planning for the rebuild began well over a year ago by the Research Institute’s software development team, led by senior software engineer Joshua Gomez.
The Portal Working Group, comprised of Research Institute colleagues who meet regularly on the project, as well as the Portal Advisory Group, which includes representatives from contributing institutions, all provided valuable insight on what changes might be implemented for the upgrade. The Portal system was rebuilt using modern software development frameworks and tools—which will facilitate the continual release of enhancements and new features for future iterations of this fundamental tool for art-historical research.
The announcement is here.
