A beacon of digitised art: Pharos consortium builds massive digital database

The Frick Collection in New York has spearheaded a major initiative to digitise its collections and those of 13 other international institutions, including the Courtauld Institute in London, the Getty Institute in Los Angeles and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Called the Pharos Art Research Consortium, the platform quietly launched last autumn and currently houses 25 million publicly available and searchable images, along with related historical documentation (some of which was previously unpublished). The original project partners anticipate that an additional seven million images will be digitised and available on the platform by 2020. The Frick Art Reference Library—a six-storey research institution in New York established in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick, the daughter of the museum’s founder—currently holds over 1.2 million images of works of art that until now had to be visited in person and used in situ. “Researchers today are accustomed to having online resources at their fingertips, and in order to ensure that our offerings remain relevant and accessible, they must be digitised and catalogued in a searchable central resource,” Ian Wardropper, the director of the Frick Collection, said in a press release.