Getty Art History Information Program

During the 1980s and 1990s the Art History Information Program (AHIP) pioneered research on the informational needs of art historians and was the driving force behind several collaborative projects concerning art-related texts and images that provided unprecedented automation of, digitization of, and access to these types of materials. AHIP was a program developed and overseen by the J. Paul Getty Trust, a cultural and philanthropic organization serving both general audiences and specialized professionals. The Trust is a not-for-profit institution, educational in purpose and character, that focuses on the visual arts in all of their dimensions. As of 2009 the Trust supports and oversees four programs: the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Getty Foundation; the Getty Conservation Institute; and the Getty Research Institute, which, among other things, continues the work begun by AHIP.

AHIP was envisioned as early as 1981 with the following goal: to create "a set of linked data banks, some created by the Getty, the rest of diverse international origin, containing the varied types of information used by art historians -- bibliographical indexes, biographical indexes, catalogues of works, images of works, and a host of other related data and texts to facilitate the scholar's work, all accessible through simple, unified, and inexpensive means by individual scholars around the world working at personal computers without intermediaries" (AHIP memo, February 1986). In 1984 Nancy Englander (then Director of Program Planning and Analysis) presented key elements of the emerging Art History Information Program to the Getty Board of Trustees, including a number of databases. AHIP soon became a program under the J. Paul Getty Trust and a pioneer in databases for the arts and humanities.

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