Arts databases - Topics

How digital archives changed the way curators research Documentation before treatment matters more than the treatment itself The archive is not neutral and art history is only starting to say so What the digital turn changed in how art historians ask questions Predatory art journals publish anything and charge for the privilege Open access in art history runs straight into copyright holders What metadata do you even attach to a generative artwork? Reference lists for art are only as good as their last editor Stub ratio as a rough index of who gets documented Who actually reads the catalogue raisonné? How much of a collection catalogue is guesswork about dates? Lost films and the archive searches that finally find them Digitisation reduces handling but no file replaces the object Why do museums and libraries file the same artist under completely different headings? Who writes the rules that decide what counts as a controlled vocabulary in art? How do you catalogue a performance that left no object behind? The gap between what an artwork is called and what people search for Why searching a museum database by subject is still harder than by artist name Why exhibition catalogues are so hard to find after the show closes Measuring digitization quality instead of digitization quantity Machine translation leaves sculpture terminology a mess Can Art Institutes alumni still get transcripts after closure? The hidden labour behind linked open art data Why infoboxes for artworks rarely match the article body Why a decade of art history can be documented by one gallery's invoices Why do so many art articles stay stubs for a decade? Who pays to keep a national art database online for the next century? When a merged database quietly overwrites one institution's records Why galleries send price lists on request instead of publishing them Why do museum databases still describe works in language curators now avoid Why provenance records matter more to buyers than to scholars