Promoting Innovation: Standards and Dialogue for Public Art Resources

Abstract

This paper aims to review practices in cataloguing public art collection archives and recent efforts to publicly present those records. We examine how to improve communication between knowledge bases to educate, inform and improve search results. Re-examining contemporary public art — a national, civic collection of permanent, temporary and ephemeral artworks — we explore current online standards and auxiliary applications. This paper reveals the failure of vocabulary standards in traditional collections to reflect contemporary artists’ diverse toolkit to address site and engage audience beyond traditional venues. With this paper we present the University of Minnesota's digitization of Public Art Review, an international print magazine with 23 years of publication history published by Forecast Public Art, and examine municipal collections and grassroots efforts to promote dialog and sharing between communities through Web Resources of Art in Public (WRAP).