Honors Program: The J. Paul Getty Trust

What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
Internally, building the vocabularies has been a time- and labor-intensive undertaking, both technically and intellectually. Many of the ideas behind the Getty vocabularies were conceived prior to the advent of the World Wide Web. As the Web world and the creation of millions of largely unstructured resources became realities at a very fast speed, the Getty faced the internal challenge of renovating our processes and systems to make the back-end production engine robust and powerful enough to handle large amounts of data effectively and the front-end user interface friendly and flexible enough for the ever-changing Web environment. Project management in a world of changing requirements and limited resources was a major challenge; subject matter knowledge of art and art history research was another.

A great external challenge lies in convincing museums to use the standards-based tools for documentation and end-user access. Museum professionals tend to be horrified by an expression like authority control. Art historians usually consider themselves authorities on a particular artist, school or art form and being told the exact name to use for an artist, or what an object in their collections should be called, is abhorrent. Thus, a period of consciousness raising and education began in the late 1980s, as museums made the first attempts to control their collection information in electronic information systems. We believe we have been successful in showing art professionals that the use of a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus does not put constraints on their scholarshiprather, it uses the power of expert information and technology to enable users to retrieve relevant information whether or not they use the particular term used by a given institution or scholar. The educational effort continues today, with museums increasingly open to receive the message of standards-based documentation for enhanced and expanded access to collections information.


Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
The allocation of resources in the Getty ITS and Web Services departments, which support 20 to 40 technology-related projects in any given year, is always an issue that demands clear institutional prioritization and effective execution of our tasks once resources are allocated. Getty ITS worked closely with the Getty Trust, program and department executives to prioritize all technology project proposals and obtain funding. ITS worked closely with Getty Vocabulary Program (the user department) to clearly articulate the benefits and significance of these projects to the overall mission of the Getty Trust. All proposals were collected, documented and presented to Getty executives for decision-making. By assigning a project manager who was well versed in the vocabularies, ITS achieved a high level of teamwork and alignment with users. By holding a high standard of project management discipline across the department, ITS successfully delivered the projects in the portfolio and earned the trust of the internal clients (the Vocabulary Program) and Getty executive management. ITSs success in delivering projects on time and within budget -- and the tremendous groups of users whom we can demonstrably show we have served with our vocabulary tools -- proved to be the best argument for obtaining approval for additional funding to further support and grow the Getty vocabularies. Recognitions and confirmation from our users of the value added by ITS to core Getty projects are often more powerful than self-advertisement. Murtha Baca, head of the Getty Vocabulary Program, states, Our production system is the result of extensive analysis and programming -- and expert project management -- from a dedicated team of technical experts from ITS with specific subject expertise. The database editors who develop and maintain the Getty vocabularies have advanced knowledge of and degrees in art history and information science, and are experts in standards-based thesaurus construction.


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