IN AUGUST 2009 we reported on new online resources, pref­acing the Editorial with the remark that ‘art historians have been relatively slow to adapt to the changes being wrought on their discipline by automation and to take full advantage of the benefits that it offers’. They may have been slow to adapt, but there is now certainly a steady stream of new initiatives. To name just three very recent examples: a few weeks ago CERES was launched, an online catalogue of Spanish museum collections; the Warburg Institute in London officially announced that it has put material from its archive, library and iconographic collections online; and the Getty has made it known that it has now made the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) freely available on its website, having already recently put online a database providing access to the Goupil Gallery stock books kept at the Museum, including high-­resolution photographs of every page.

With so many new projects, one can be forgiven for not being able to see the wood for the trees, although Teutonic thoroughness has provided a helping hand in the form of the German internet portal Arthistoricum,1 while a similar portal can be found on the Getty website.2 But the abundance of initiatives is daunting and organising online material does not come without its problems; this led to a timely and very useful symposium held in March in Leuven to ponder what it called the ‘baroqueness’ of the web.3 This online extravaganza certainly has its positive sides: there is now an enormous quantity of primary and secondary sources available in full text, often also allowing users to flip virtually through the pages of a book; online image databases are getting more comprehensive by the day; and there are a good many periodical archives, as well as newly established e-journals, published exclusively online.

But problems remain. While the internet is designed to provide instant access to today’s information, online periodical archives by their very nature only provide access to older mat­erial. Another drawback is that the internet has inadvertently encouraged the now all too familiar target culture by making it easier than ever to create citation indexes (which keep track of the number of times a book or article is cited in the scholarly literature); these do not tend to take the relative value of the citations into consideration, and such unrefined but easily accessible data are welcome news for policy makers eager to cut funding for research into slightly more esoteric subjects or for research that is considered less ‘relevant’. Conversely, it can equally be misused by academics eager to secure funding.

Online image databases are certainly coming of age, although copyright is still a major obstacle, especially in the field of modern and contemporary art, where even museums often find that they cannot illustrate on their website what might be a spectacular acquisition because of prohibitive copyright fees. But impressive examples that have transformed research include the Marburger Bildindex in Germany, the Netherlands Institute for Art History’s RKDimages, the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings in the United Kingdom, as well as Artstor, the last named providing images that are often of very high quality. Museums are now very keen to put their collections online, sometimes providing the kind of high resolution that scholars especially will appreciate.

Most people agree that in an ideal world all art-historical databases should communicate with each other and be acces­sible through one single portal, although how best to approach this mammoth task is less than straightforward. Efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s to realise such a system did not fare well; the Van Eyck Project (Visual Arts Network for the Exchange of Cultural Knowledge), which was funded by Brussels, has in fact been put on hold. The Europeana website, launched with much fanfare in November 2008 and also funded by European money, has, after some teething problems, at least materialised and currently brings together some six million digital items from European institutions, including images, texts, sound and videos, but its intellectual framework is very meagre, largely due to the fact that Europeana works entirely from the top down by requesting material from institutions and throwing it into a huge melting pot.

If there was one overriding conclusion to the Leuven sym­posium, it was that, as long as the many initiatives that have sprung up and will spring up in the future adhere to standard technical specifications for online databases, their integration can always be achieved at a later date. This is not to say that there should be no collaboration, but for now it will have to be mainly a matter of good communication and sensible choices. For instance, it is impossible for the RKD in The Hague to scan and properly index all its photographic material, but it knows that its strengths lie in Dutch and Flemish art and has wisely decided to concentrate on those, at least for the present. Should the embattled Witt and Conway Libraries come to the con­clusion that they need to bring their collections online, they would do well to adopt a similar ad hoc system and concentrate first and foremost on what is not available elsewhere, thus avoiding the trap of the ‘blanket approach’.

The above examples are of necessity only a very small selection of the topics that were discussed in Leuven. The realisation that integration is a future goal, not a starting point, certainly gives hope for the continuing flowering of all sorts of new projects, making the internet an ever more Baroque church for ideas and initiatives, and perhaps one day that church will have a more streamlined Neo-classical design. For now the Burlington will do its bit by providing on its new website, to be launched in the near future, a comprehensive survey of online art-historical databases.