The Gifts That Keep on Giving: Digital Contemporary Art Catalogues at Watson Library

Librarians Tina Lidogoster (left) and Andrea Puccio (right) present a poster at a recent library conference in Fort Worth, Texas

«Since 2001, Watson Library has been growing an unparalleled collection of contemporary exhibition catalogues thanks to the generosity of galleries around the world. Our collection of over fifteen thousand print catalogues spans sixty countries, with more than thirty languages represented. Many artists featured in these catalogues have little else published about them, making these publications a vital resource for researching or discovering emerging artists.»

Countries of galleries that have contributed to the Contemporary Catalogues Project

Over the last few years galleries have started sending us digital copies of their catalogues as PDFs in addition to, or even instead of, print versions. We currently have over four hundred such catalogues, and the best part is that we are able to make all of them freely available through WATSONLINE and Worldcat.org, so you can download them from anywhere you can access the Internet! We receive new PDFs just about every week via email as attachments or links, through file-transfer websites, or as snail-mailed CD-ROMs and USB drives. Once catalogued, the files are uploaded to a cloud-based storage account and links are added back into the bibliographic records to provide access. Downloading and storing the catalogues in this way helps ensure reliable access to these otherwise ephemeral resources.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen, Denmark

DEPO Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

MOP Projects, Sydney, Australia

Frank Lin Art Center, Beijing, China

To help get these digital exhibition catalogues out to the world, we are looking to make this a more collaborative, cross-institutional effort by reaching out to our peers. In March, we presented a poster at the annual Art Libraries Society of North America Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, and drew a lot of interest in our project.

Hopefully other libraries will join the effort to catalogue these materials to make them available. In the meantime, keep checking in as we continue to grow this amazing collection!