3.6 Collaborative and museum publications

Electronic publication has the potential to rejuvenate the catalogue, now the staid dowager queen of arthistory scholarship. Catalogues raisonnés, museum collection catalogues, and exhibition catalogues—the three types of catalogues differ in scope but not in concept. They are collaborative innature, usually large in scale, and intensive in focus. Their distinguishing feature is close analysis of individual works ofart, with exhaustive and current data on dating, authorship, quality, condition, interpretation, and provenance, among otherthings.

The catalogue raisonnéembodies the scholarly values of exactitude and thoroughness. It aspires to document anartist's complete oeuvre, which not infrequently involves locating and documenting a thousand or more works of art, a prodigiouseffort extending over a decade or more. Publication of catalogues raisonnés, often in multiple volumes, is invariably costly, yet immediately upon publication, they fall out of date: an unknownwork surfaces, a date is revised, an attribution is challenged, ownership changes. There is no efficient way to collect andcommunicate corrections once the catalogue is published.

Research and publication are independent, sequential steps in the prevailing print-world scenario, butcatalogues are precisely the sort of scholarship that would be enhanced by a more dynamic electronic process that allowed researchand publication to overlap and inform one another in a feedback loop. Partial publication would elicit response, which in turnwould enrich subsequent entries or assists in sleuthing out other works of art. Electronic communication would mobilize a moreorganic connection between research and publication, with data collection, incremental publication, and correction and revisionoccurring simultaneously under the close supervision of an editor. Collaborative software allows contributors to work in a collectiveonline space that promotes the exchange of information and ideas. As catalogue sections are completed, they could be electronicallypublished; no need to wait for the entire corpus to be completed before publication, which could take many years. Editors ofelectronic catalogues could regularly correct misinformation, report on disputed attributions, update bibliography, and detailthe historiographical record as it changes over time. Readers could gain access to information in a timelier manner and could targettheir research with tagging and search engines that surpass print indexes. With a click, the researcher could group works by date,subject, medium, or location. As other fields have discovered, document collections and primary source materials, such as artists'correspondence, criticism, and sales records, are also prime candidates for electronic publication because data-mining toolsincrease their research value.

Electronic publication need not surrender the individual authorial voice to a nameless, collective mind along thelines of Wikipedia. Scholars could set the ground rules so that collaboration unfolds under editorial supervision and revisingpreserves rather than effaces variant editions and changing thoughts.