Facts about the Art Discovery Group Catalogue

Abstract

Overview of the history and the benefits of the Art Discovery Group Catalogue. This group catalogue is first international discipline specific discovery tool based on Worldcat. It brings together the bibliographic data from more than 60 art libraries in 15 different countries, but also the metadata from repositories and the Worldcat records. It enables discovery of aggregated bibliographic data from the participating libraries and unifies scattered indexes by simultaneous searching of over 1900 databases and millions of journal articles and e-books from WorldCat Central Index. The Art Discovery is a discovery tool, showing the results from the configured group. When one of the libraries in the group has a holding on a journal, all the articles from those journals will surface in the results. To make the best use of the discovery engine, OCLC introduced the new user interface and experience for Art Discovery. Most important for our subject oriented catalogue is the improvement of the relevancy ranking by including the Library of Congress subject headings for art and history in the new best match default setting. From 2010 onwards, the Future of Art Bibliography (FAB) group was looking for new ways of facilitating art historical research collaboratively. The FAB initiative resulted in the need for a discovery environment for discipline specific information and sources. The FAB group and the Artlibraries.net group joined forces to develop a common electronic research index as a power-plant for information research in art history. The Art Discovery Group Catalogue was launched in May 2014 after technical problems with its predecessor Artlibraries.net became unresolvable. With bibliographical and digital repositories expanding exponentially, there need to be a technical solutions to help researchers find trusted information. Art Discovery is successful and keeps evolving, it could also relieve the need for libraries to purchase and implement expensive and untested commercial discovery products.