Art Works, Art Markets, and Cultural PolicyGerman Sales 1930-1945

As part of the project ‘German Sales 1930-1945. Art Works, Art Markets, and Cultural Policy’, 3,200 auction catalogues from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the countries occupied by Germany during the Second World War from the period 1930 to 1945 were recorded in the Getty Provenance Index®, digitised, converted into searchable full texts using OCR and made available for academic analysis in the Virtual Library of Art History, arthistoricum.net.

The project partners were the Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, which owns the most extensive collection of auction catalogues in Germany, the Heidelberg University Library, which has the most experience in comparable digitisation projects, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, which contributed its database infrastructure, which has been tried and tested over decades.

As a result of the project, indispensable sources for provenance research and art and social science research on the German art market were made available and freely accessible to the general public.

Running time: 01.11.2010–28.02.2013