EAN
EAN – european-art.net
The European Art Net is a follow-up project of the EU project vector, which was conducted under the guidance of basis wien and is devoted to the recording and accessing of materials on contemporary art in accordance with scholarly principles.
EAN is an open association of various archives of contemporary art. All participating institutions have made it their mission to collect and preserve materials on contemporary art and to record and make them available in accordance with scholarly standards of archiving. This diverse information is made publicly available under the address www.european-art.net in the form of a portal, which went online in December 2002. The common search engine allows simultaneous queries across multiple, distributed databases. The United List of Artist Names (ULAN) of the American Getty Institute was the inspiration for this retrieval system, whose search function is still being extended and currently makes available numerous data sets on persons, groups and institutions.
In 2011 the Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK-ISEA took over management of the project from basis wien and the Swiss magazine Kunstbulletin, which had hitherto jointly performed this task.
Prominent partner institutions include the documenta Archive in Kassel, the State Library of Saxony, the State and University Library of Dresden (SLUB), and the Virtual Library of Contemporary Art. After the database of the AVU Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, i-datum.cz, was integrated into the EAN online portal in 2005, the project has researched in recent years other documentation centres in central and eastern Europe and entered into contact with very different and interesting archives. One of these is the Documentary Archive and Digital Memory Department of MNAC – National Museum for Contemporary Art in Bucharest; with its CALL FOR DOSSIER project, which presents young Rumanian artists, it too became a member of EAN in 2008.
