LOS ANGELES, CA.- How does the high-quality, glossy museum collections catalogue, traditionally made for print, fit into today’s world of apps, e-books, and iPhones? Going digital with scholarly publications requires museums to completely rethink the ways content about their collections can be created and shared. The Getty Foundation, together with eight major museums, is leading the way in digital publishing for museums, including the recent launch of an interactive, multimedia catalogue by the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the final publication from the group.

The Getty Foundation began the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) in 2009 in partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum and eight other museums: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; Tate; and the Walker Art Center. Together the group has been tackling the challenges of online publishing by creating new prototypes for scholarly catalogues in the online environment.

“Publishing scholarly collection catalogues is a critical part of a museum's mission, yet printed volumes are costly to produce and difficult to update,” said Deborah Marrow, Director of the Getty Foundation. “Digital publishing presents an attractive, interactive alternative, but with complex challenges. Approaching these issues as a team has been the only way to develop models for the museum field.”

While many organizations are charging a premium for this type of online content, the OSCI group is providing it free of charge as a resource to scholars and the general public.

When the initiative first began in 2009, tablet computers were not yet in widespread use and the iPad had not been released. Five years later, audiences have come to expect that all organizations, including museums, will provide quality digital content in easily accessible and dynamic formats. This is what the Getty Foundation’s OSCI collaboration aims to deliver.

Although each participating museum developed a project based on the nature of its permanent collection and institutional values and priorities, the consortium has worked as a group from the start – an innovative approach in the museum world. During the process, the group has developed a set of tools and resources that are now being freely shared, paving the way for digital innovation among museums. The software tools developed by the group are both flexible and replicable, so they can support a broad variety of collections-based publications by other museums.

Under the OSCI banner, the collaboration has produced an abundance of dynamic online content. Thanks to these OSCI resources, readers are now able to study detailed images of artworks online, overlay them with conservation documentation, view videos with artists discussing their work, discover scholarly essays in easy-to-read formats, take notes in the margins that can be stored for later use, and export citations to their desktops – among a variety of interactive ways to engage with the new scholarship.