Excerpt from Sir William Gell’s 1830 Pompeii Travelogues
Photo: Getty Research Institute

The Getty Research Institute announced last week that it is adding metadata for over 100,000 images and texts, focusing on art history, to the Digital Public Library of America’s archives (DPLA), Hyperallergic reported. The DPLA was launched last year to bring several American institutions such as the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian together in one online space.

The announcement is the second major new online archiving initiative in the past month. As artnet News previously reported, the Internet Archive Book Images organization published 12 million images on the image sharing site Flickr earlier this month (see “12 Million Historic Photographs Digitized“). Those photographs are all available for free use.

The material from the Getty Research Institute’s library and special collections dates back to the 15th century and contains useful records of art dealers’ bookkeeping and painting inventories as well as letters written by renowned artists such as Edouard Manet. The contribution also includes travelogues, such as a 19th century sketchbook of the Italian city of Pompeii and a 1918 report on Jerusalem’s art scene.

The highlight of the Getty’s archives is a comprehensive collection of over 5,500 images from the late architectural photographer Julius Shulman, which stands as an important record of modern design.

As part of the new partnership, the Getty will continue to add additional images and other material to the DPLA archives in the future.