College and Research Libraries WOLFGANG M. FREITAG Wanted: A New Index to Exhibition Catalogues The absence of bibliographical control over, and index entries into, the substantial body of exhibit catalogs produced annually by the world, s museums works considerable hardship on art libraries and their patrons. This paper urges that steps be taken soon to fill this im- portant lacuna in bibliographical coverage of art literature. NOT LONG AGO, in an article dealing with "Bibliographical Organization in the Humanities," Conrad Rawski quot- ed from Brunetiere these words of wis- dom: "Qui scit ubi scientia sit, ille est proximus habenti."1 The simple truth of this dictum will certainly not be con- tested by scholars or by reference librar- ians, but what surprises the reader of the article is that its author seems so well pleased with the general state of bibliographical services for art and that he is apparently not aware of a major missing link in the bibliographical chain spanning the field. Professor Rawski, who is a teacher and not a practicing librarian, can be forgiven for his lack of consciousness of where the shoe pinches art librarians, bibliographically speaking. Others who are closer to the firing line have felt that pinch for several years. James Humphry III, until recently Chief Librarian of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has pointed a finger at this cru- cial information gap in a special ,issue 1 Conrad H. Rawski, "Bibliographical Organization in the Humanities," Wilson Library Bulletin, XL (April 1966), 7 46. Dr. Freitag is Art Librarian in the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. 540 1 of Library Trends devoted to subject bibliography: The publication of catalogs in conjunction with museum and gallery exhibitions has signalled a great need for bibliographical control of this increasingly important ma- terial. These catalogs are no longer a two or three-page handout to serve as a guide for the casual visitor, but often represent a scholarly oeuvre-catalogue of definite documentation relative to the works ex- hibited, and with extremely useful bibli- ographies. 2 In 1962 Jane Clapp published her bibliography of Museum Publications3 in which a small number of exhibition catalogues are listed. The emphasis on her work, however, is published cata- logues of permanent museum collections. Only those exhibition catalogues in print and obtainable from museums at the time of compilation of the bibliography are included. Important categories of catalogues, such as the catalogues of museums listed in Books in Print, and therefore available through regular book 2 James Humphry III, "Architecture and the Fine Arts," Library Trends, XV (January 1967), 483. 3 Jane Clapp, Museum Publications: Part I. Publi- cations in Anthropology, Archaeology and Art (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962). Wanted: A New Index to Exhibition Catalogues I 541 trade channels, are specifically exclud- ed. The most useful feature of the book is the index, which lists in one alphabet authors and subjects. These refer the in- formation seeker to the publication num- ber which is assigned to each entry in the bibliography. Unfortunately, the non-serial character and the geographi- cal and editorial limitations of Museum Publications, which also attempts to cover anthropology and archaeology in addition to art, severely limits its use- fulness as a reference tool. Another bad feature is the many misspelled names and titles. The reason so many libraries have found it necessary to compile their own systematic indexes to exhibit catalogues is that the two most important current bibliographies, Art Index and Reper- toire d'Art et d'Archeologie, have not been able to cope with this large and difficult segment of art literature. For many years the reference library of the world-famous firm of art dealers, M. Knoedler and Co., has struggled val- iantly to keep au courant its index to ex- hibition catalogues. This index attempts to establish, without a break, the com- plete documentation of each individual art object shown that has ever been of professional interest to the company or has passed through its sales rooms. Ev- ery summer teams of college students have found employment, trying to catch up with the accumulated indexing back- log and producing great quantities of in- dex cards that must be filed and stored in a formidable bank of catalogue card cabinets. The race against time and the swelling flood of new catalogues makes the task of catching up a more hopeless one every year. It is not so much the quality of the many outstanding scholarly catalogues, which serve as vehicles for the latest re- search results and which are also made available later in hardcover format as monographs, that are solely to blame, but rather the fantastic increase in num- bers of the many not-so-scholarly cata- logues which are nevertheless important for the documentation of art historical facts that so utterly defy handling by traditional bibliographical methods. In his book, The Museum Age,4 Germain Bazin makes the statement that there are today more than four thousand mu- seums in the United States alone, and that a new one opens every three and one-third days. Since most of these mu- seums publish catalogues occasionally and some quite regularly, and since the museum age is not limited geographical- ly to North America, it is obvious that we have arrived at a turning point in the history of art bibliography. How long will it take before the flood of ex- hibition catalogues engulfs us all? The Art Index does not cover exhibi- tion catalogues at all, although it does include reviews of exhibitions which ap- per in periodicals and museum bulle- tins. The Repertoire a Art . et d' Arche- ologie, which goes beyond the scope of a periodical index and does list mono- graphs as well as articles, includes a very limited number of exhibition cata- logues, all of them of monographic cali- bre; they are identified by the symbol for monographs, i.e. , an asterisk which precedes the item number, and the no- tation "-Exposition" which follows the body of the bibliographical entry. The extent to which exhibition catalogues are covered in this selective bibliogra- phy is, of course, absolutely inadequate. Moreover, the time required for the preparation and publication of the Rep- ertoire results in a time lag of two or three years, which makes it practically useless as a reference tool for "current awareness" and current factual informa- tion. A solution to these problems of cov- erage and timeliness has been attempt- 4 Germain Bazin, The Museum Age (New York: Universe Books, 1967), p. 260. 542 1 College & Research Libraries • November 1969 ed by a specialist bookselling organiza- tion in the United States. In 1963 the Worldwide Art Catalogue Centre of New York City brought out a pilot issue of a quarterly entitled The Worldwide Art Catalogue Bulletin. 5 The Bulletin indexes and abstracts the catalogues of circa five hundred mu- seums and galleries in twenty countries in Europe and America. The abstracts are written by specialists under the di- rection of an able editor, Eva Kroy Wis- bar. The Bulletin is an excellent first step in the right direction, that of uni- versal bibliographical coverage of ex- hibition catalogues. It is doubtful that it can ever be more than the first step. At the present time WACB lists only those catalogues of which the Centre is able to procure sufficient quantities for com- mercial distribution, and even as the firm expands its network of agents to gather this elusive type of literature, which in many countries does not even get into the regular booktrade, it cannot hope also to expand a bibliographical by-product which must by its very na- ture remain a nonprofit, if not a money- losing, proposition. And yet this begin- ning is excellent. These bibliographical listings should not be allowed to wither because of lack of funds; rather, they ought to be expanded in several direc- tions at once. Obviously, exhibition catalogues which fulfill an archival as well as a current information function and which today are of the first importance for art scholars, museum curators, dealers, and collectors will have to be gathered more quickly before they go out of print, and all parts of the world must be covered more systematically. The Worldwide Art Catalogue Centre as a booktrade organ- ization should be free to concentrate on this end of the operation. But the cata- 5 Th e Worldwide Art Catalogue Bulletin (New York: Worldwide Art Catalogue Centre, v. 1, Fall 1963) . logues must also be indexed differently from the serial and periodical articles with which the present bibliographical services deal, and for this a separate or- ganization is needed. Both the works of art themselves, that constitute the con- tent of exhibition catalogues, and the literature about them should be ana- lyzed in much greater detail and in greater depth than has been possible with traditional methods of abstracting and indexing. For instance, random ac- cess should be possible to the following types of information: Artists, Media, Lo- cations, Provenance, Iconography (Sub- ject), Chronology of Exhibitions, Col- lectors, Sponsoring Organizations, Prin- cipal Bibliography for each work men- tioned. All this information should be cumulated at regular intervals to form a permanent bibliographical record of the literature as well as a documentation of the works shown. It is obvious, from the exacting de- mands upon the new tool which we en- visage, that it can only be produced with the aid of today's most advanced data processing technology, and that it will require a considerable staff of ex- pert abstractors. Ideally, the editorial of- fices of the New Index should be locat- ed at the site of a master collection of the catalogues from which the informa- tion is culled. In time, after a sufficient amount of information has been collect- ed, the computerized index could form the basis for an art historical data bank and referral center. It would be possible to prepare specialized bibliographies on demand and to retrieve specific informa- tion from the data stored. Repackaging and selective dissemination of informa- tion on the basis of user profiles would be a major activity of the center and perhaps even one that has certain busi- ness possibilities for defraying part of the costs. Convinced that the formidable prob- Wanted: A New Index to Exhibition Catalogues I 543 lems of information and document con- trol in the fine arts demand radically new methods for their solution, a group of nine American art historians, museum curators, and art librarians met in New York early in the spring of 1967, and in May of that year submitted an applica- tion for a grant to the Council on Li- brary Resources. The grant would have enabled the group to conduct an eco- nomic feasibility study for the project which has been described in the pre- ceding paragraphs. Unfortunately, after an initially favorable reception, the ap- plication was later dropped by the Council, partly because of a shift in its policy and partly because of ongoing projects of a technically similar nature which it was supporting. The need for a solution to the prob- lem of bibliographical control of exhibi- tion catalogues continues to exist. Today it is even more pressing than it was two years ago, and it is not likely that it will diminish in the foreseeable future. The writer of this article, who convened the New York meeting in 1967, hopes that by bringing the problem once again to the attention of educational foundations, learned societies, bibliographers, infor- mation scientists, and bibliographical publishers, it might attract the interest of some organization capable of con- quering it. • •