The Institute Web site has achieved its goal of reaching a general public interested in cultural heritage community building, as well as the researcher, the scholar, and the student by creating a site that is graphically interesting, contains useful authentic content, and is constantly changing to meet the interests of its audiences. The Institute’s Web site gets the majority of Internet traffic for the Getty Center.

The Institute’s traditional audience of museums, libraries, research organizations, universities, an international scholars has come to rely on the Institute’s Web site as a source of easily accessible and authentic cultural heritage content and tools.

Because of popular Information Institute culture projects like the Los Angeles CultureNet and Faces of L.A. now on the Institute’s Web site, new audiences of a broader nature are drawn to the resources as well. Thus the site acts as an information resource as well as advocacy vehicle for better understanding and interacting with diverse cultures.

By presenting a clear organization of information, the Institute’s Web site offers a variety of users searchable access to databases like the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artist Names, the Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Categories for the Description of Works of Art, Census of Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance, the Guide to the Description of Architectural Drawings as well as information on the Bibliography of the History of Art, the Provenance Index, and the Avery Index of Architectural Periodicals. All of these extensive databases were created and produced by the Getty Information Institute and it partners. They continue to be standards in the library, museum, and archive international community.

The Information Institute development of a Web based search tool, a.k.a. (Also Known As) has allowed Getty Information Institute Web site users to cross-search a variety of cultural databases simultaneously. This search engine allows researchers, students, and interested cultural communities to enter find related information about a subject or term easily and makes maximum use of the networked capabilities of the Web platform. Another project that extends a.k.a is ARTHUR (Art Hub User Resource) that, in partnership with the NEC Corporation, has created a search tool that finds images on the Web based on search criteria of keyword or image form. Both a.k.a and ARTHUR can be filtered by using the vocabularies of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artist Names, and/or the Thesaurus of Geographic Names.

By using reference tools like AAT, ULAN, and/or TGN as filters for keyword cross-referenced searches the Information Institute's Web site has enabled refined and targeted searching for cultural material. In the domain of cultural scholarship, this is a major advance in finding authentic and accurate information. These standard vocabularies (AAT, ULAN, TGN) have moved from single bodies of print information into the realm of electronic tools. There simultaneous automated use as search filters takes maximum advantage of the careful, international standards development that went into creating them and then uses them on the global platform of the World Wide Web.

Finding authentic information, cross-referencing, image matching, and targeted, refined searching capabilities are desperate needs of the Internet. The tools and resources on the Getty Information Institute's Web site are pioneering efforts in this domain. The Web site represents an effort to work on these problems at a very high level, the level of cultural diversity and contextual understanding. In a sense, if clarity and utility can be applied to information gathering and processing in this kind of highly complex domain, the impact on domains less complex could be a major source of growth for the Internet.

As we evolve methodologies for using digital technologies for communication and education within the cultural heritage community, those methodologies themselves become valuable assets to disseminate to the cultural audience we serve. How we produce is as important as what we produce. The methodologies are a form of advocacy, and communicating them is an educational service/product. For instance, as we develop a strategy for creating digital documents that can be multi-published as books/periodicals, CD-ROM, and/or Web materials and create software to cross-reference their content as well, we are developing a method of matching electronic forms to content. Our methods have been cost effective, robust, and easily communicated to an international audience as well as within the Getty.

Search tools for the Web site, like a.k.a. were all based on existing Internet protocols and standards like the Wide Area Information Search (WAIS). The effort to make the site accessible to low-end computer and modem users, to limit the use of graphics to utilities and color coding of sections, and to create a "reference aesthetic" for the site based on the comfort of the library, museum, educational organization audience while at the same time making an attractive interface for the general audience were all considerations in designing the site effectively. One of the interesting problems we defined for the Web site was how to make publications into places, sites that could be linked and could be places were new information about subjects could be collected. Introduction to Digital Imaging was a popular book produced by the Institute that became an on-line site. Another example was a joint conference with the Getty Conservation Institute and the Long Now Foundation on the longevity of digital materials called Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity whose pre-conference Web site became an on-going site for on-line discussion around issues of long term responsibility for using digital technology to record cultural information.

The target audience was familiar with a small, limited site that had been functioning for two years before the current site was built beginning in 1995. The audience immediately found the site useful and new audiences were brought to the site over a period of three years. 

The creation and development of the Internet and the World Wide Web at the close of the twentieth century is a happy coincidence for the launching of the Getty Information Institute on the eve of the twenty-first century. The overwhelming acceptance of the Getty Information Institute’s Web technology by a world community is something that has been gratifying. As the Web becomes a standard platform for international communication and commerce, the Institute has provided studied influence on standards as well as connection to substantive scholarly resources. The Institute Web site has been the place that studies and understands the relevant issues for standards for both the present and the future. New challenges may come in the form of using such Web sites for authentication of cultural information, verifying sources, and creating platforms for projects that are historically accurate.

The creation of a "reference aesthetic" for the site was a challenge. A good deal of reference material that is text based has no visual style. We used abstracted data records as design elements, embraced the "tab" as an icon of the librarian and researcher, and made graphic reference to artifacts being wrapped in contextual information that gives them meaning. Another innovation was place thumbnail images of paintings at various points in the site. When the user becomes curious they can click on the images and be taken to a series of links to data references from the Bibliography of the History of Art, the Union List of Artists Names, the Provenance Index, etc to get a sense of how an image of a work of art is connected to expanding sets of contextual information, thus using the site itself to demonstrate what the site is all about. In a sense, making the invisible visible is the challenge of designing reference to inspire the user to go a little further, find out a bit more about any given subject. The secrets are there.

The design approach described above appears to be original with the Information Institute’s Web site. The level of authentic detail, the attention to an aesthetic that reveals both the excitement of discovery and the courage and dedication of individuals who devote their lives to collecting historical information were driving factors in making the site inspirational as well as informative.

The Information Institute had been called the Getty Art History Information Institute for some twelve years before becoming the Information Institute in 1996. The first Getty Web site was put on-line in 1993 as an experiment to learn more about using the Internet to distribute art historical information. With the development and opening of the new Getty Center in 1997, AHIP was renamed the Information Institute. In 1995, a Communications Program was formed for the Institute to research and develop digital publication, digital design, and digital communication. That group, directed by Ben Davis, consisted of Janice Kash (graphic designer), Steven Swimmer (multimedia/Internet designer) and Martin Diekhoff (multimedia/Internet designer) as well as interactive graphic consultants Michael Worthingiton and Julie Crane. The team represented a new approach to "Information Design" that integrated graphic design, interface design, information architecture, and art and art historical context. In cooperation with the other programs of the Institute (Vocabularies, Technical Research, Network Initiatives, and CultureNet Initiatives) the team designed, built, revised, and maintained the Institute’s Web site and at the same time kept records of the process that will result in a publication in 1998: Introduction to Building Cultural Web Sites.

The Institute’s Web site won the Museums and the Web Best of the Web Award for Best Museum Professional’s Resource in 1997. This is currently the only international organization that looks at and evaluates cultural Web development, so the award has verified the quality and importance of the Information Institute Web site.

The site is fully operational and has added new sections like the series of Millennium Lectures started by the Communications Program, on-line version of other Introduction to Series books (also created by the Communications Program) such as Introduction to Metadata, Introduction to Vocabularies, Introduction to Archives, Introduction to Managing Digital Assets, and development of Introduction to Building Cultural Web Sites/

How many people benefit from it?

Statistics went from around 100,000 "unique page views" in August of 1997 to around 300,000 "unique page views" in August of 1998. The site is currently (December 1998) around 400,000 unique "page views" per month. What this means in terms of actual number of people is hard to estimate because we have not had the option to parse out "unique visitors" to the site, but a completely unscientific guess might be somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 unique visitors per month. The 400,000 unique page views is telling because it shows not only how many people are "served" but is a qualitative measure of the combination of two important factors: number of people plus their enthusiasm for and/or use of the site.

In the fall of 1998, the Information Institute projects and staff will be integrated into the other programs of the Getty Center (Museum, Conservation, Research, Publication). This integration will serve as a way to move information technology and expertise into all facets of the Center’s operation and bring a sense of information design to all its programs. The Getty Information Institute’s Web site will also be integrated into the Web developments of the other organizations, bringing the same levels of aesthetic, authentic, and innovative concern to the entire organization.

5. Difficulty

The Information Institute’s Web site had to act as a visible communication tool, an advocacy platform, an information resource, and a laboratory for exposing its audience to new ways of using technology for the arts and humanities. The greatest obstacles for the project were coordinating all of those concerns as if they were "multiple priorities". The identity of the organization in all its wide range of interests (culture, standards, project-based initiatives, partnerships, community building, graphic identity, etc,) had to be inherent in the design and functionality of the Web site. The Web site had to explain the organization. The Information Institute was at once advocating digital technology, evaluating digital technology, and using digital technology to understand the issues around relying on it to preserve cultural memory. Communicating that complexity with an emerging medium like the World Wide Web (and one should remember that the WWW only began in 1993) is both a challenge and an obstacle. Although the J. Paul Getty Trust has enormous financial resources, it is still an organization that must prioritize its endeavors and often convincing such an organization of the nearness of the "future" is not a trivial task. There is overwhelming evidence that the "information design team" is an essential organizational structure to deal with the digital future.