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The Getty Center: Switching On The Visual Arts

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The Getty Center is a prototype for museums and art networks of the future. The 110-acre hilltop site is currently the largest cons truction site in the United States, and the largest endowment for the arts. The J. Paul Getty Trust, a private operating foundation, created The Getty Center to unite its seven Los Angeles-based programs

in the visual arts and provide a new primary location for the Getty Museum, currently in Malibu. The Getty Center will be a world-class center for scholarly collaboration, research, education and preservation of the visual arts.

Within 18 months, the telecommunications team decided to implement 1,500 nodes on dedicated switched Ethernet ports, ATM servers and an OC-3 ATM backbone. The new higher-speed network will allow Getty people and programs to work together in new ways. The switches will scale up to provide ATM interfaces for imaging or interactive museum multimedia applications. The Getty Center will be able to create and separate virtual LANs based on MAC addresses, IP numbers and specific rules. Getty employees occupy the site this month.

The Getty museum will provide Visitor Interactive Educational Workstations (VIEW)-a multimedia kiosk for visitors. Visitors can use one of several touch-screen workstations and view the collection or audio/visual clips. Images are scanned at high resolution from 4x5 transparencies and delivered at a variety of resolutions. VIEW will access 40,000 images stored in the 40-MB to 100-MB range.

The future plan for nearly real-time multicast video involves five channels of cable TV and one Getty TV channel, which is MPEG-1 video (1.5 Mbps). The Getty Channel feed will provide programming from the 450-seat auditorium for employees and resident scholars.

The Art History Information Program (AHIP) collaborates with institutions in the Americas and overseas to evolve and establish standards that will guarantee the preservation of information and ensure that it remains accessible on the networks of the future. Initiatives include Networked Access, Imaging, International Documentation Standards for the Protection of Cultural Ob jects, Categories for the Description of Works of Art, and Intellectual Integration. AHIP's Web server, (http://www.ahip.getty.edu/ahip/home.html) uses a FreeWAIS search engine for all AHIP databases. It will deploy coordinated vocabularies as reference resources, as well as other standards for searching the Internet.

The Getty Center is expected to open to the public in the fall of 1997. The Malibu villa will close, remodel and reopen in 2000.

Updated June 14, 1996