A Wealth of Scholarship: The J.

Paul Getty Center Library

by Susan Malkoff-Smith
g g T a m an apparently incurable art-collecting addict," wrote J. Paul Getty in his autobiography, As I See It. The result of that "addiction" is the J. Paul Getty Museum. Getty began his collecting in the 1930s with his interest focused in three distinct areas: Greek and R o m a n antiquities, French decorative arts of the eighteenth century, and Renaissance and Baroque painting. The collection was brought together in a large Spanish-style house in Malibu, purchased in the 1940s. In 1954 it was opened to the public, after having been officially incorporated as an educational trust. Over the next twenty years, the collection grew at a steady pace, as did the number of visitors to the museum. New galleries were gradually added,
Above: The Getty Museum replicates a Roman villa,

but Getty's passion exceeded those expansions. Replicating a R o m a n villa In 1968, the firm of Langdon and Wilson was hired to produce drawings for a new museum. At that time, Getty asked Stephen Garrett, a London architect, to comment on them. Abandoning the ideas of a simple addition to the existing buildings, Getty and his trustees considered several other options for the new museum, among which were the re-creation of Sutton Place (his headquarters in England) and a combination of a Roman villa on the exterior and a Tudor manor on the interior. The final choice proved to be a replica of a Roman villa, the Villa dei Papiri, known only from the drawings and diary of Karl Weber, a Swiss engineer who supervised its excavation during the eighteenth century.

complete with inner peristyle garden

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The Villa dei Papiri was quite similar in its geographic setting to the present site of the museum in Malibu: a gently sloping hill, overlooking the sea. Located in Herculaneum, the villa was buried by the same volcanic eruption that entombed both Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 A.D. To this day the Villa dei Papiri has not been fully excavated; it is located some sixty feet below the surface of the earth. Karl Weber was able to make his drawings from an elaborate tunnel system that was devised in order to remove the treasures found there. Marble and bronze statues and mosaic floors were all part of the finds taken from the site. The construction of the present museum, begun in 1970 and completed in 1974, was a collaboration of craftsmen, construction workers, an architectural historian, Dr. Norman Neuerburg, and Stephen Garrett, who coordinated the project. U p o n completion of the new "Roman villa," attendance exceeded all expectations: from an average of about sixty visitors a week, it jumped to an astonishing 100,000 within the first two months of operation. The museum's staff gradually increased as well, numbering about seventy employees by 1974. Among these were three curators: Burton Fredericksen, curator of paintings; Gillian Wilson, curator of decorative arts; and Jiri Frel, curator of antiquities. The operating budget, too, took a great leap during this period, from a $25,000 annual budget in 1965 to a $40 million endowment and an operating budget of about $2 million in 1974. Getty died in 1976 without ever having visited the newly constructed museum in Malibu. The terms of the will surprised everyone, including the museum staff. There had been great speculation about the future of the museum and its departments. Getty's will left $700 million to the board of trustees of the museum, the agents who would handle this sum at the end of probate. What was more remarkable, there were no explicit instructions as to how the money was to be spent. Getty had written in his autobiography: "As I learned it in my youth, a gift-whether to the public or an individual--is something given of one's own volition and
Susan Malkoff-Smith is serials librarian at the J. Paul

without strings attached. Otherwise, it is no longer a gift but a business transaction. And if I had wanted to do business with my collection, I would have gone all-out and sold it off." In March 1981, Harold Williams was appointed as president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and began a year of exploration to determine where the trust would focus its resources and energies in the field of art and art history. When the Getty estate was finally settled in 1982, the $700 million had grown to about $1.4 billion, making the museum one of the wealthiest in the world. The following gives an idea of the magnitude of the endowment: "As an operating trust, not a grant-making foundation, the Getty is obliged to spend 4.25 percent annually of the market value of its endowment on activities it develops and operates. With the present value of the endowment at approximately $1.4 billion, the spending requirement is $60 million annually." This considerable amount of money allows the trust to consider the support of projects and activities that would not otherwise be realizable. In May 1982, the Getty Trust announced its first decisions about future activities. These decisions were informed by discussion with several hundred people who have special expertise. As a result of this intensive assessment of the field, commitments were made by the trustees to a Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, a Conservation Institute, a new museum, and a Center for Education in the Arts. The second Getty museum, the Center for the History of Art, and the Conservation Institute will be located together at an as yet undetermined site somewhere in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Center for Education in the Arts is not envisioned as a physical entity but rather as a locus for coordinating activities in other places and drawing widely on the expertise of consultants and experienced practitioners.
A collection to serve art scholarship

Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Malibu, California.

The library, which began as part of the museum, will become part of the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Its early development, however, mirrors the growth of the museum itself. The core of the library collection began with the hiring of the museum's first curator, Burton Fredericksen. Calling himself a "library

829

groupie," Fredericksen began to collect books that would serve to form the nucleus of the library. Although he was not explicitly given funds from which to purchase books and research materials, Fredericksen managed to increase these holdings until the first librarian, Katherine Jones Isaacson, was hired and a formal library was established in 1973. From that date through 1979, the library grew steadily both in staff and number of volumes. The scope of the library's collection followed generally that of the art collection. Traditional print media, including books and journals, were collected, as well as other more specialized materials such as art auction catalogs and such unusual tools as the microfilms of the G a r d e Meuble de la Couronne (inventories of furnishings, from furniture to linens, bought by French royalty from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century). The close proximity of UCLA'S Art Library, the Research Library of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Huntington Library somewhat obviated the need for the Getty Museum Library to broaden its collecting scope. Orginally intended as a seminar library both in terms of physical space and collecting scope, the library was used extensively for its specialized collection. The collection s~rved the needs of the museum's curatorial staff and other departments as well as local scholars, collectors, and art history students. Visiting scholars, both from the United States and abroad, also made use of the library. From 1976 through the final settlement of the estate, the library continued its growth both in number of full-time staff and number of volumes being added to the collection. When Anne-Mieke Halbrook was hired as the new head librarian in 1979, the library staffhad doubled its size. The collection included approximately 15,000 monographs and serials plus an additional 15,000 art sales catalogs. The rate of acquisition was approximately 3,000 volumes a year. Realizing that the Getty estate would eventually be settled, the library, along with the rest of the museum, began formulating plans for expansion, to be implemented in stages. Automating the library's technical services was a high priority. In 1980, through CLASS(California Library Authority for Systems and Services), the

J. Paul Getty

Library joined REIN (Research Library Information Network), primarily because art history has always formed a particularly strong subject focus in that network. This shared database network linked the Getty Library with major libraries throughout the United States. Cataloging was the first technical area to be automated, with acquisitions close behind. Acquisitions increased from 3,000 volumes a year to approximately 45,000 volumes during 1981 and 1982. Automating this section was the best way to gain control over such expansion. The most immediate result of this phenomenal growth has been exceedingly cramped library quarters, and the greater number of the library's holdings are currently in storage. In January 1983, the Getty joined the libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in participating in scIPIO (Sales Catalog Index Project Input Online). scIPIO is not seen as an index to auction catalogs, but as a catalog of the holdings of the member institutions. As its portion of scIaIO, the Getty Library has undertaken the addition of its extensive retrospective holdings of art auction catalogs, currently estimated at 40,000 volumes, while the other libraries have divided the responsibility for adding the records of current auction sales catalogs to the database. In addition to indexing

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by auction house and date of sale, scIPIO affords access to the sellers listed on the title pages of these catalogs.

Developing "a world-class library"

The next period of growth for the library must be seen within the context of the developments of the Getty Trust. The J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities is one of the first new institutions to be sponsored by the trust. The development of the library is closely linked with the development of the center. According to Nancy Englander, director of program planning and analysis, the center was "conceived as an institution dedicated to research in the history of art in the broader context of the humanities, with a world-class library and archive of photographs of works of art and other information resources not concentrated at any other single place in the world." The center, Englander notes, "is committed to furthering new scholarship, the development of new research resources--particularly in the area of photo-documentation--the enhancement of existing resources at other institutions, and the preservation and dissemination of information, facilitated at each stage by the potential provided by new technology." Guiding the center's development is an advisory committee, which currently includes Hubert Landais, director of Musres de France; Irving Lavin, professor of art history, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Willibald Sauerlander, director of the Zentralinstitut for Kunstgeschichte in Munich; Seymour Slive, Gleason Professor of Fine Arts, Harvard University; and Craig Hugh Smyth, director of I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence. The first steps have already been taken to establish the center. Until a permanent site is found, the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities will be housed in temporary quarters located in Santa Monica, about five miles from the museum in Malibu. The library, photo archive, and administrative offices for the center will move there as soon as modifications to the building have been completed sometime after June 1983. It is expected that the library's current holdings of approximately 110,000 monographs and periodicals and 40,000 auction catalogs will

grow to an estimated 450,000 items. The staff size will double from sixteen to about thirty persons. The scope of the collection will be expanded to include Western art from classical antiquity through contemporary American art, with eventual expansion to certain areas of nonWestern art as well. Englander says: "The center is committed to having more than just a good library. The vision of the library is of a scholarly center within the center; it is not conceived as only a storehouse and retrieval system, but as a milieu for exchange of scholarly ideas, staffed by scholars as well as librarians." The library's planners are currently investigating an integrated, online, in-house computer system that will link all facets of the library's operations. With the development of a wide variety of modules to perform such functions as circulation, binding, and serials control, the library user will have greater access to the collection. During this transitional phase of development, the museum's staff hope that access to the library will be provided via this network, which will allow for experimentation with subject headings tailored and modified to meet the specific needs of the center. The library's planners are also committed to an extensive program of preservation so that printed materials are not lost to future scholars. It is estimated that preservation will be required for approximately 100,000 books and another 200,000 periodicals. The center is anticipating working with the Library of Congress in its evaluation of digital and analog technology to develop a prototype system that could be used to both store and retrieve these materials.

Bibliographic expertise
The rapid growth of a collection of such projected size requires the collaboration of many individuals. Collection development is being guided by the library staff along with the cooperation of such scholars as Wolfgang Freitag, director of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University. Freitag has been given a year's leave of absence to consult with the staff of the Getty Center. As part of this effort, he is developing a bibliography of significant titles that are basic to research in art history. In the future, it is anticipated that guest bibliographers will be invited to the library, for varying lengths of time, to develop the collection within the framework of

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Librarian Anne-Mieke Halbrook

their specialized expertise. Art historians who have participated in the museum's visiting scholars program have provided the library with bibliographies of works significant to their fields, and it is expected that the anticipated scholars-in-residence program at the center will also be a rich source of expert knowledge. All too often, study in the humanities is hampered by the lack of timely, extensive coverage of the literature in the field. The Getty Center has already made substantial commitments to the goal of improving access to information in the humanities. Since 1981, the Getty has operated the Repertoire Internationale de la Litterature de l'Art (International Repertory of the Literature of Art) or RILA, a semiannual publication that indexes and abstracts current American and European art history literature. The scope of RILA will eventually expand to include other historical periods, such as ancient art, as well as to increase the number of citations and frequency of publication. RILA editors are located throughout Europe at major art history centers such as I Tatti in Florence, the Schweizerisches Institut fiir Kunstwissenschaft in Switzerland, the Courtauld Institute in London, and the Zentralinstitut for Kunstgeschichte in Munich. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), begun in 1980, has been adopted by the Getty

Center as another valuable tool with the potential to enhance access to resources in the humanities. Frustrated by the existing lists of subject headings commonly applied to various indexing systems (which lack logical hierarchical structures and well-reasoned cross-reference structures), the originators of the AAT sought to establish a workable demonstration model of a syndetic subject thesaurus. The field of architecture, as a discrete subject area, was chosen for this model with the expectation that a wider range of topics will be developed in the future. One promising application of the AAT under consideration is its use for indexing RILA. It is expected that the architecture portion of the thesaurus will soon be tested against RILA and the Avery Index of Architectural Periodicals, as well as another cataloging project of architectural drawings. Eventually, the AATwill also be applied to other media such as photographs and slides, as well as to art objects. The enhanced subject access and retrieval capabilities thus generated will be of fundamental importance to the scholarly community.

Enhancing scholarship The library of the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, as an integral component of the center, will strive to develop programs and technologies that will directly enhance the ability of scholars to do what they have always done--study, research, explore new ideas, muse, discuss hypotheses, and develop new insights. To come full circle, it is worthwhile noting the origin of the name of the Villa dei Papiri. According to the museum's guidebook, it comes from an extensive library of Greek and Roman texts, written on rolls of papyrus, that have now been partially deciphered: "The works were principally philosophical in nature, especially Epicurean, and featured works of a certain Phil o d e m u s . . , it has generally been supposed that one owner of the villa was Piso and that the library was that of Philodemus." What could be a more fitting memorial than the development of a center that sees as its primary goal the continued enrichment of scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge to the widest possible audience? It remains for future generations of scholars to determine whether the center will succeed in attaining its goals. []

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TITLE: Wealth of Scholarship: The J. Paul Getty Center Library SOURCE: Wilson Library Bulletin (R) 57 Je 1983 PAGE(S): 828-32 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.hwwilson.com/