Preserving born-digital catalogues raisonnés: Web archiving at the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)

Abstract

There has been a dramatic shift in publication of scholarly art research materials from print to digital formats. In late 2013, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) was awarded a two-year grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address challenges of preservation and continued access for future researchers of these materials by implementing a web archiving programme. Due to the transition of many catalogues raisonnés to online from print, born-digital catalogues raisonnés are one of the five key collecting areas of focus for NYARC’s project. The intention of this article is to provide an introduction to the key components of the implementation of NYARC’s web archiving programme, to explore the far-flung implications of the digital shift, and to demonstrate the need for a community of collaboration in building curated web archive collections to benefit the future art historian.