Eleanor Fink
 Director
 Getty Information Institute
 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 300
 Los Angeles, CA  90049-1680
 Fax:  (310) 440 7715

 January 5, 1998

Dear Eleanor,

We've spent a considerable amount of time during the past month trying to define the scope of a possible collaboration between AMICO and the GII regarding the use of the GII vocabularies given the response we had from you on November 17, 1997.

As we explained when we were in California for preliminary discussions regarding our potential collaboration, AMICO is primarily interested in the GII vocabularies as intermediaries between the user and the data in the AMICO Library, to enhance searching and improve recall. The vocabularies can only serve this function if they contain the terms in the databases being searched. The AMICO databases must be compared to the GII vocabularies and missing terms (representing either new concepts or alternate terms for existing concepts) added to the vocabularies for the intermediation to succeed.

Since your response states that the GII cannot match the AMICO files against its vocabularies, we would have to conduct this matching process ourselves. Unfortunately, identifying terms that are not in the GII vocabularies is only useful for AMICO if the vocabularies are then updated to reflect the new terminology. Since you cannot give us a time-frame in which any new terms would be added to the vocabularies, even if we identified missing terms and provided the museum authority for them, we cannot justify the time or the expense of developing and running the matching routines.

We regret that the GII is unable at present to accommodate what we think will soon be the largest source of artifact-based terminology that has ever been gathered in the art world. We think that this body of terminology could greatly enhance the AAT and ULAN. We hope that in the future the GII will be in a position to receive such data from the community and update its databases in a timely fashion to reflect museum practice.

If the GII is interested in exploring batch processing mechanisms for implementing the GII Vocabularies, perhaps AMICOâs Technical Operations Committee could work with a contractor to develop the term matching routines and work-flow processes? In this and other ways, AMICO and its member institutions are happy to explore how we might work together in the future.

Sincerely yours,

 David Bearman and Jennifer Trant
 AMICO Management Consultants

c.c. AMICO Executive Committee