Setting a New Cyber Standard : A Getty program is helping ensure art history’s rightful place on the new information networks. The challenge is in finding consensus among arts organizations on how it should be done.

The Art History Information Program is one of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s mysteries. If you ask local art aficionados to describe the program, they answer with quizzical expressions. If you make the same request of art historians, you get nods of recognition from people who say, “Oh, AHIP,” but even they can’t tell you what it actually does.

Of all the trust’s Los Angeles-based endeavors--including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Grant Program and organizations devoted to art conservation, research and education--the Art History Information Program may be the least understood. As the branch of the Getty that deals with the futuristic world of computer technology, AHIP is concerned with global communication, but it is only beginning to get its message out in art circles--let alone to the masses.

Eleanor Fink, director of the program, takes the challenge in stride. Confronted with incomprehension or confusion, she cheerfully starts at Square One: “I usually begin by explaining that we are one of six operating programs at the trust, not a branch of the Getty Museum.”

Then she takes a big leap to Square Two: “Our mission is to enhance access to art historical information. . . . We focus on the issues and policies that need to be addressed for arts and humanities information to be part of the information highway.”

Simply stated, the mission doesn’t sound impossible. But ensuring that art history takes its rightful place in cyberspace is enormously complicated because thousands of organizations all over the world use computers to gather facts about art. And, for the most part, each goes about its business in a unique way, effectively speaking its own language.

The challenge is to cut through the babble so that the information compiled by all these organizations is available to anyone who may want or need it--and that calls for cooperation and diplomacy. No single entity can impose its methods on all the others, so AHIP functions as a catalyst to bring disparate organizations together in forums that can lead to agreement on communication standards, policies and practices.

The idea is to encourage “those concerned with preserving the cultural heritage to collaborate in building a cultural information infrastructure,” according to Fink.

Transplanted from Washington, where she earned a master’s degree in medieval art at the American University and directed the office of research support at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, Fink joined the Getty in 1987 as AHIP’s program manager for information standards and services. She became acting director of AHIP in 1993, when former director Michael Ester resigned, and she was named director last November.

Like other Getty Trust programs, AHIP will be permanently housed in the new Getty Center in Brentwood, scheduled to open in 1997. Until then, Fink and her colleagues will continue to occupy temporary quarters in a Santa Monica high-rise. Fink has a corner office with an ocean view, but her working environment is dominated by sleek computers, desks and conference tables.

*

Since its beginnings in 1983, AHIP has helped art history scholars conduct research through advanced computer technology. But the program’s direction has shifted as the art community’s needs have evolved, Fink said in an interview in her office. The concept of establishing a single comprehensive data base for art history has given way to the more realistic notion of a global information network society.

“We all need to consider the implications of what an information society means and how to plan for this change,” she said. “Networks are an encompassing medium; they join components as opposed to isolating them. To prepare for these emerging information networks, a major challenge we face is less about technology and more about what information will move across networks.”

And that information will not only be of interest to art professionals. “It’s less about the art scholar at Princeton and more about K through 12,” Fink said. She envisions a time when “institutions yet to be joined by networks will collaborate in bringing together complementary collections of information to create a virtual tapestry of cultural heritage resources” to be used by a broad audience.

“One can well imagine students navigating from bibliographic materials in libraries and archives, which provide information about works of art, to images of artworks made available by museums on the networks of the future,” she said.

To help make that vision a reality, AHIP has launched five initiatives:

* “Networked Access” encourages the cultural sector to create and distribute cultural history information and to take an active role in shaping related policies. In collaboration with several institutions, AHIP is developing a “knowledge base” to identify electronic resources available through networks, define the art community’s needs and foster the use of uniform standards for electronic information.

* “Imaging” defines the role of digitized images of artworks in museums’ and archival collections, advocates standards for the creation and dissemination of digital archives and promotes understanding of intellectual property rights issues that apply to electronic images.

* “International Documentation Standards for the Protection of Cultural Objects” attempts to stem the tide of stolen and illegally exported cultural objects by promoting art-identification standards and rapid exchange of information. AHIP has conducted a worldwide survey of art-documentation practices to build a consensus on how cultural objects should be identified. A conference planned for 1997 will seek international agreement on standards that will help track wayward cultural objects across national borders.

* “Categories for the Description of Works of Art,” a collaborative project funded by the Getty and the National Endowment for the Humanities, has forged an agreement on information categories to be used by professionals for art objects and reproductions. The categories will be published in a guidebook after they are tested.

* “Intellectual Integration” is an experimental project designed to test and validate the concept of integrating disparate information sources into a decentralized, virtual database. Under this initiative, AHIP has joined forces with MUSE Educational Media to explore educational uses of art images and related information.

In addition to these enterprises, AHIP has produced three resources for creating and retrieving information about works of art: “Art & Architecture Thesaurus,” a 90,000-term guide to art and architecture vocabulary; “Union List of Artist Names,” including 200,000 variations of 100,000 artists’ names, and “Thesaurus of Geographic Names,” containing 300,000 names of places.

*

Working alone or with other institutions, AHIP also has produced research databases. Among them, the “Provenance Index” accumulates and disseminates information related to the history of collecting and the ownership of individual works of art, the “Bibliography of the History of Art/Bibliographie d’Histoire de l’Art” provides 24,000 references per year in English and French, and the “Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals” indexes about 200 architecture journals.

The watchword of all these projects is standards. In a field that has produced no fewer than 52 spellings of Michelangelo’s name, professional agreement on standards is essential because it is nearly impossible to retrieve information without them. Furthermore, Fink says, standards protect the long-term value of data.

“If we have a message to the art community, it’s that the information you have digitized is your most valuable asset,” she said. “The hardware and software will change repeatedly, so make sure your information has long-term viability.”

The Getty’s Art History Information Program met some resistance in its early days, but that’s not true now, Fink said. “People understand that this is a cultural revolution. It’s going to happen. If we’re going to be part of it, we have to get on the stick.”