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Search Engine and Evaluation Project: |
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Obtaining Copyright Holder Contact Information for Ellsworth Kelly |
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As a member of the Registrar's team in a university art museum, I am responsible for reviewing all incoming reproduction requests for pieces in our collection. Requests regarding pieces created before 1900 are generally straightforward and can be granted without a great deal of trouble, however, when a piece has a creation date after 1900 some detective work is required. For pieces created between 1900 and 1978 the date that the pieces come into the public domain are variable depending upon several factors including first publication date, if any, where applicable, the date of the artist's death and whether the copyright was renewed by the artist or his family, estate, etc. 1978 is something of a sea wall in art copyright issues, in 1978 the "1976 Copyright Act" took effect, this law states that the copyrights for all artwork created after 1/1/1978 are the exclusive property of the artist and are not automatically transferred when a piece is sold.
Today I find myself in the role of requestor. My museum plans to produce a catalog to accompany an upcoming exhibition of 20th century works and because many of the pieces were created after 1978 we will need a signed release from the copyright holder of each piece to be reproduced. One of these works is Blue Panel, painted in 1980 by Ellsworth Kelly*. Because this piece was created after 1978 I know that I need to locate either Mr. Kelly or his designated representative in order to make the request. I have decided to utilize the Internet in order to perform this research because I know that it is more frequently updated than the hard-copy artist index in the library and hopefully more current.
I have selected Google and HOTBOT® for my search. Google and Yahoo are my current all-purpose default engines so Google was an obvious choice but HOTBOT is unfamiliar and I am interested in learning more about it. Google has a unique "authority ranking" system whereby it weights pages based on the number of pages that link to it and also by the "authority" of a page, i.e. The Metropolitan Museum of Art would receive a higher ranking when searching for "fine art" than would a smaller, less renowned institution. Both engines offer a user-friendly interface although Google's is pleasantly serene in its sparseness after the neon colors and dancing credit cards on HOTBOT. Advanced search options including language selection and site specific searching, are available with both engines; both offer the option of Boolean operators. A Boolean search is available from the Google main search screen or from four selected "all, any, exact phrase, & without" on the Advanced Search screen where the user must select "Boolean phrase"from a drop-down menu on the HOTBOT main search screen. Both engines also offer web directories with indexed pages categorized by topic.
I have set out the following criteria by which to evaluate my searching experiences:
I decided to forgo the web directories for each site and, after going through several iterations, searched both engines with the phrase: "Ellsworth Kelly" + reproduction. From the main HOTBOT page, I selected a Boolean search and entered my search phrase. I also specified "English" language. Frankly, the results were disappointing, most of the pages returned include only Ellsworth Kelly's name and several omitted the phrase "reproduction" altogether. One page that appeared to belong to a course studying American Art did appear promising and offered links to Kelly paintings in the collections of two established museums: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco and the Tate Gallery but each one was disappointingly labeled with "Copyright retained by the artist" and offered no additional clues. I was surprised to have retrieved so few dealers and galleries and, fearing that I might have used inappropriate syntax or committed some other offense, decided to give HOTBOT a second chance via the subject directory but this search returned no results.
My search with Google returned somewhat more satisfying results--the second result was a hit! The second page that Google returned was for "Masterworks Fine Art", a commercial entity, and my search returned the index page for Ellsworth Kelly. At first this appeared to be a miss but a closer look at the credit line beneath the reproduction of the lithograph offered for sale revealed" © Artists Rights Society (ARS)." I recalled having heard of this before and quickly typed "Artists Rights Society" into the Google search bar to return the page of an organization that purports to represent Ellsworth Kelly along with many other artists of note. I looked a little further and found not only that the organization has a history and fairly complex web presence but that there is also readily available contact information which indicates that this is likely a legitimate resource.
Obviously, the Google search was the most successful and satisfying as it yielded the information that I sought. Addressing my efficiency criterion, I had no trouble with any of the page returned pages taking an inordinate amount of time to load, however, my search was performed on a computer linked to a DSL connection and the results would most likely vary with a different type of connection. Both engines permitted language selection so my language criterion was not applicable, although Google does permit translation of foreign language pages into the user-defined language. Google seemed easier to use for searching with Boolean terms and for simulating natural language, even after selecting "Boolean phrase" from the HOTBOT menu, the user must insert "+" before each term in the phrase to indicate that it is a required term. After conducting my initial search, I returned to HOTBOT and attempted to search again with variations upon my original phrase and none returned satisfactory results-- HOTBOT did return a few articles that included "Ellsworth Kelly" but not the elusive copyright contact.
HOTBOT is suited to general searching but perhaps not best for professional or scholarly interests. The "All About Google" page touts the "PageRank" technology used in their search as key to their success and I was impressed with how few "irrelevant" results were returned. I would recommend Google over HOTBOT to anyone seeking fine art related information. Especially exciting was a Beta test version of an Image Search available on the Google site; this will be a valuable resource for the general public as well as anyone working in art education.
* Blue Panel, 1980 by Ellsworth Kelly can be seen in the exhibition, "20th Century Works from the Patton Collection" at the Ackland Art Museum this fall.