Getty Provenance Index Remodel Project

In 2016 the Getty Research Institute embarked on a three-year project to remodel the Getty Provenance Index® databases and publish them as Linked Open Data (LOD). The goal of this project is a complete conceptual and technical overhaul in order to provide greater access to the databases and to increase the Index's use as a leading tool for research. The remodel will facilitate research not only on the lineage of individual works of art, but also on the aggregate behavior of agents in the art market, on shifting tastes and values, and on the flow of cultural objects through time and space.

A pioneering project in the digital humanities, the Provenance Index was founded more than 30 years ago and contains over 1.5 million records taken from source materials, such as archival inventories, auction catalogs, and dealer stock books.

Datasets on GitHub

To enable open and convenient access for researchers to full datasets from the Provenance Index before the LOD versions are released, select datasets will be made available on GitHub. These datasets can be downloaded as .csv files and will provide more granular access to the data than the files that can currently be downloaded from this website and will eventually be superseded by the LOD release.

News and Updates

December 15, 2017: Sales Catalogs available on GitHub
September 28, 2017: An updated version of the Knoedler Stock Books has been published on GitHub. This update contains major changes to joint sale records, with a focus on standardizing price shares between M. Knoedler and Co. and other dealers. The new dataset also reflects additional cleaning and normalization work to support linked data transformation.
June 30, 2017: The Provenance Index Remodel project completed the first year of its three-year schedule. During this time, the project team conducted user research on a new search interface and focused on tools and processes that will transform datasets into Linked Open Data, particularly to integrate them with the Getty vocabularies.
November 16, 2016: Knoedler Stock Books available on GitHub