Museum Catalogues from Eight Institutions You Can Now Read Online | The Getty Iris

"I’m pleased to ­share that all the museum partners in the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) have now published their catalogues — available to all, at no charge. The initiative recently reached this major milestone with the release of a free digital publication from Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. Going digital with collections catalogues required us at the Getty Foundation and our partners to completely rethink the ways museums create and share content about their collections. As a group, we tackled the challenges of online publishing by creating new models for scholarly catalogues in the online environment that we anticipate will be widely adopted. The digital world was very different when the initiative first began in 2009—before the iPad was even released! Five years later, audiences have come to expect that all organizations, including museums, will provide accessible, dynamic digital content, and this is what these catalogues deliver ..."