DUBLIN, Ohio, 1 May 2014—The new Art Discovery Group Catalogue, a view of WorldCat that brings together items from leading art libraries around the world, was launched today at the Art Libraries Society of North America annual conference, in Washington, D.C.

Coordinated by artlibraries.net, an international working community of more than 100 art libraries from 16 countries, the new catalogue offers an art-focused research experience within the WorldCat environment. Art library catalogues will now be searchable alongside additional content from a multitude of online journals and databases, promising more results on a global scale. The project has been developed as part of The Future of Art Bibliography initiative, with generous support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and The Getty Research Institute, whose initial funding made the launch possible.

“The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is the best place to start for art-related content discovery,” said Geert-Jan Koot, Head of the Rijksmuseum Research Library in Amsterdam. “Art historians want a unified, focused, and reliable service to provide comprehensive research findings and pinpoint discovery of individual items in the world’s leading art libraries. The artlibraries.net and Future of Art Bibliography groups have collaborated with OCLC to provide such a tool for art research, along with access to the core functions of WorldCat and its global library holdings.”

The Art Discovery Group Catalogue will initially include the holdings of art libraries from Europe, North America and Australia. Additional art libraries will join the initiative. Participating libraries include the IRIS Consortium in Italy, the Institut National d’Histoire d’Art (INHA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the kubikat union catalogue of the German research institutes in Florence, Munich, Paris and Rome, and the National Gallery of Australia.

“The artlibraries.net group chose to work with OCLC for development of the Art Discovery Group Catalogue because we were very impressed with WorldCat’s search functionality, including its scoping and faceting of result sets, fast response times, and unlimited scalability,” said Véronique Goncerut Estèbe, Chief Conservator at the Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie in Geneva, Switzerland. “We also chose WorldCat because, as the world’s largest research database, its searches can include holdings of thousands of libraries worldwide and more than 200 million journal articles from sources such as ArticleFirst. This new level of global exposure will maximize discovery and use of our collections.”

“The addition of more art libraries in WorldCat and the focused Art Discovery Group Catalogue will greatly benefit audiences who, while used to searching WorldCat, have not yet been introduced to many of the treasures held in art libraries internationally,” said Kathleen Salomon, Assistant Director of The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, USA.

“The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a great resource for scholars, students or anyone else interested in art,” said Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director, OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa. “We look forward to continuing our work with these prestigious art libraries and others who want to join in adding to this global catalogue dedicated to the study of art.”