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Since its publication
in 1983 The Print Council Index to Oeuvre-Catalogues of Prints by European
and American Artists by Timothy A. Riggs has been a mainstay of print
research. The original 834-page volume incorporated the enormous body
of catalogues raisonné published through 1972. Around 1992 the
Board of Directors of Print Council of America began discussing the possibility
of issuing an addendum to the Index to Oeuvre-Catalogues. I proposed that
a useful tool might be a bibliographic database that would incorporate
the existing volume and subsequent publications and which could be updated
and expanded at will in the future. The idea caught on and the initial
efforts at fund raising were undertaken by Print Council President Richard
S. Field. Without Dick's initiative the IPCR might never have been undertaken. We are very grateful to all those who have supported this project. Major funding was provided by The Dave and Reba Williams Foundation, and our co-publishers The International Fine Print Dealers Association. Additional support was offered by Alan and Suzanne Dworsky, Sam Josefowitz, Christie's, and Sotheby's. With funding in place our first task was identifying a Project Programmer and Project Bibliographer. The Department of Academic Computing at the University of Kansas has been extremely generous in supporting the project from its inception. For this we are grateful to the Director of Academic Computing, Jerry Niebaum, his successor, Cathy Smith, and Assistant Director of Adacemic Computing, Wesley Hubert. We are most indebted to Academic Computing for allowing us to contract the services of Doug Miller as our Project Programmer. Doug is Programmer/Consultant for Academic Computing Services at the University of Kansas and a specialist in building relational database in FoxPro. Doug has done a spectacular job with the complex tasks of designing the database and its WWW interface.
It is important to acknowledge that during the first year of work on the database Doug, Lauren, and I were all deeply involved in the process of defining exactly what the database and the bibliography would comprise and how they would work together. The complex and positive working relationship that evolved was made possible in large part by the flexibility and adaptability of both Doug and Lauren. The project would never have succeeded without them. While all the work on the database and the new research was under way, two committed colleagues were hard at work re-keying the original Index into the database: Cynthia Suenram and Rachel Buller. When we hired Cindy her business card indicated that she was "Queen Compositor" at Kansas Key Press — she now does freelance editorial work. Rachel is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Kansas. We anticipate merging the data being entered by Rachel and Cindy with Lauren's bibliography by the summer of 2000. We are very pleased to have been able to enlist the services of BaoVo as our initial web designer. We were initially attracted to several sites that Bao designed for organizations with concerns similar to those of Print Council of America. We are grateful to him for taking the time to design an elegant and accessible site for us. Finally, we would like to thank the many members of Print Council of America who contributed time and effort to the project: Georgia Barnhill, Jay Fisher, Peter Parshall, Mark Pascale, Andrew Stevens, Roberta Waddell, and Amy Worthen Stephen Goddard |
Copyright © 2000 Print Council of America. All rights reserved.
We
were very lucky to enlist the services of Lauren B. Hewes as Project Bibliographer.
Hewes has worked with prints at the Clark Art Institute and in her role
as Associate Curator at Shelburne Museum. She has also worked as a cataloger
at the American Antiquarian Society and she has catalogued the nineteenth-century
American prints in the Reba and Dave Williams Collection. Lauren's energy,
professionalism, and good humor have contributed enormously to this project.
Through on-line searching and personal visits to innumerable libraries
in the U.S. and Europe Lauren has greatly expanded the scope of the original
edition of the Index. Lauren enjoyed special assistance from Reba Williams
in the area of American Prints. See