Art and Artist Vertical Files README and LICENSE 
Last updated 2017-01-09 kt

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General Information
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Art and Artist Files is an inventory of the vertical files held in the Smithsonian Libraries on artists, galleries, museums, sitters, patrons, and occasionally subjects. Each record represents one or more file folders containing ephemera such as newspaper clippings, press releases, exhibition invitations, reviews, résumés, or brochures related to that person or institution.

The database does not contain sensitive Personally Identifiable Information for individual artists.

The majority of names are not authority controlled (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_control). However, if the record uses the authorized form of the name, per the Library of Congress Name Authority File, the "authorityrecord" field will be = 1 (TRUE). 
Most of the institutional, i.e., corporate, name records *are* under authority control and include the VIAF number (Virtual International Authority File id number) in the "VIAFid" field.

Location of the physical file is indicated in the atAAPG, atAFA, atCHM, etc. fields which use our in-house abbreviations for the various art library branches. Abbreviations are:

atAAPG - American Art Museum / National Portrait Gallery Library
atAFA - Warren M. Robbins Library, National Museum of African Art
atANAC - Anacostia Community Museum Library
atCHM - Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Library
atFSG - Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library
atHMSG - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library
atNMAI - The Vine Deloria, Jr. Library, National Museum of the American Indian

Each location has its own way of arranging the physical files. This is sometimes reflected in the record data, such as the inclusion of country in personal name records from the Warren M. Robbins Library, NMAfA or the inclusion of city and state in corporate name records from the American Art Museum / National Portrait Gallery Library.
For more information on each library's collections see http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/art-design/artandartistfiles/more.htm 

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License
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This data is available with a CC0 license. 



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Technical Information
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The data is refreshed nightly and made available as a tab-delimited .txt file with the following field headings in the first row:

    firstname		given name
    lastname		family name
    firstname_alt		alternate first name, e.g., pseudonym or nickname (old field - now using additional_names)
    lastname_alt		alternate last name, e.g., pseudonym or maiden name (old field - now using additional_names)
    NameNonRoman	name in original script, e.g., in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. name order follows language convention.
    lifedates		birth and death year in the format YYYY-YYYY, YYYY- or sometimes b. YYYY or b. ca. YYYY
    nationality		primarily used for tribal affiliations. when multiple values are in this field they are comma delimited.
    country		files in the African Art library collections contain artist country of origin, as do most corporate records
    products		aka field or medium. used only for CHM African-American and Latino - Hispanic designers
    atAAPG		physical file is at the AAPG library
    atAFA			physical file is at the AFA library
    atANAC		physical file is at the ANAC library
    atCHM			physical file is at the CHM library
    atFSG			physical file is at the FSG library
    atHMSG		physical file is at the HMSG library
    atNMAI			physical file is at the NMAI library
    id			unique identifier for the record within the Artist Files database
    authorityrecord		indicates if the authorized version of the name is being used. accuracy of this field is dubious.
    updatedate		when the record was last updated. datetime format
    corporate_name		name of organization, e.g., gallery or museum name
    additional_names	semi-colon ; delimited list of related or alternate names for people or institutions. ntext field in original database
    topic			(not yet used)
    state			primarily used for corporate name records. location of organization.
    city			primarily used for corporate name records. location of organization.
    VIAFid			Virtual International Authority File number

Each line (record) is terminated by a CRLF and an HTML <BR> tag.