Catalogue raisonné,
beyond
the editor.

A catalogue raisonné is the most complete inventory possible of the known works of an artist — painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer — with title, dimensions, medium, date, provenance, exhibitions, bibliography and current location. Its function is scientific (referencing the work) and juridical (authenticating it on the art market).

The print version is frozen at publication date. The digital one is alive: new attributions, de-attributions, recent sales, upcoming exhibitions and restorations are integrated continuously. It is also consultable worldwide and supports semantic links to other databases (ULAN, Wikidata, Getty AAT). Many projects publish both: a living digital version and a printed one for bibliographic permanence.

A typical project runs ten to twenty years, sometimes longer. The pace depends on the corpus (two hundred or five thousand works), the state of the archives, available funding and the scientific committee's availability. These long horizons are precisely why durable tooling matters.

Scientific direction is entrusted to a committee of experts (art historians, former collaborators, reference dealers). The legal structure is typically an artist's foundation, a friends-of association or a scientific committee instituted by the heirs. A technical provider accompanies the software tooling, training and publication.

Highly variable: corpus size, team, scope. Software costs are secondary to scientific costs: committee compensation, photographer, conservator, expertise, legal counsel. An open-source choice spares the recurring licence fees over the long horizon of the project.

No. CollectiveAccess is freely downloadable and runnable (GPL licence), but a professional project — schema setup, metadata, training, hosting, maintenance — needs an expert provider. The difference with proprietary SaaS: your data and your code remain yours beyond the contract. If your provider disappears tomorrow, the project keeps running.

CollectiveAccess is the most mature open-source option for professional catalogues raisonnés. For smaller projects oriented towards public outreach, Omeka can fit. For mostly archaeological catalogues, Arches (Getty + WMF initiative) is another option.

CollectiveAccess accepts XLSX, CSV, XML, MARC, MySQL imports and ingests most formats an editor can export. The migrations actually performed by idéesculture to date concern Excel, FileMaker, AtoM and Micromusée databases. For InventoZen, ARTéo, Encyclia or vBook, migration is technically feasible but requires a preliminary audit of the exports your current editor provides. To discuss case by case.

Not necessarily. Many projects publish both: a living digital version for researchers and the market, a printed one for bibliographic permanence. CollectiveAccess supports PDF or DOCX export to feed the print pipeline.

The French Ministère de la Culture maintains a public list of digital catalogues raisonnés. The INHA (Institut national d'histoire de l'art) supports several projects. Internationally, the New York Public Library maintains a reference bibliography, and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute is the leading authority on digital catalogues raisonnés.