Getty Provenance Index Update ?
May 2 2025
Picture: https://www.getty.edu/research/provenance/
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
News has arrived that the Getty Provenance Index, one of the most important tools in provenance research for the art trade, has been updated. Press reports are heralding the news that 12 million records are now available through the website.
I've had a quick play around with the new system and it appears overly complicated indeed (compared to the old one, at least). Perhaps it is time to get studying the user guide.
To take a quote from the 'Conceptual Introduction':
In its pre-Arches form, the Getty Provenance Index represented provenance information gathered from historic documents by replicating the tabular structure of the source material as flat-file records, meaning each entry was a single, independent row without links to other data points. In the remodeled Getty Provenance Index in Arches, those flat-file records have been transformed into a linked open data system. This means each entity is uniquely identified and connected to other relevant data using controlled vocabularies and semantic connections. This remodeling from relational to graph data transforms the implicit relationships recorded in a flat-file row into an explicit, relational web of entities that consolidates people, objects, places, and events into uniquely identified resources.
In Arches, Getty Provenance Index data is generated through events. Often, but not always, these events are related to historic transfers of ownership. These events create data that populates one of nine Resource Models used in the Provenance Index: Activity, Group, Person, Physical Object, Place, Provenance Activity, Set, Textual Work, and Visual Work. These models are based on the Linked.Art metadata application profile of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) reference model.
Right. I better start thinking in terms of 'events', I suppose.
Thoughts and experiences from AHN readers are always welcome!
Update - Bendor adds: WHAT THE HELL HAVE THEY DONE? True, I am not tech minded, but from my first look, Getty have taken a resource which was astoundingly helpful and easy to use, and made it impossible to use, and utterly bamboozling. For example, the old search function allowed you to easily search for items by all manner of categories, from previous owner to lot title. Now it seems impossible to do this. And the guides to help you figure it all out are, I'm afraid, fairly unintelligible. Please bring back the old system?
