The arts institutions actively participating in this program
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 6:51 am
The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) project has a mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to vital arts content from the web by supporting a vibrant, growing collaboration of art and museum libraries. With funding from federal agencies and foundations, the Internet Archive is able to expand CARTA to a diverse set of museums and art libraries worldwide and to broaden the ways the resulting collections can be discovered and used both by scholar and patrons.
Membership in the program includes national and regional art and museum libraries throughout the United States and Canada committed to the preservation of 21st century art historical resources on the web. One of our early supporters and current CARTA member Amelia Nelson, Director of Library and Archives at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, noted the increased risk of losing art history on the web in comparison to earlier generations of artists: “Websites are the letters, exhibition postcards, exhibition reviews and newspaper articles of today’s artists and artistic communities, but they aren’t resources that scholars can find in archives like the physical materials that document the careers of earlier generations of artists. I worry that as we lose these sites, we are also losing the potential for scholars to place this moment in the canon of art history and culture broadly. This initiative will build a accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database collaborative and sustainable way for art libraries to pool their limited resources, with the technical, administrative, and organizational expertise of the Internet Archive, to ensure that this content is available for future generations.”
The initial group of member institutions have identified an initial set of more than 150 valuable and at-risk websites, articles, and other materials on five primary collection topics: Local Arts Organizations; Artists Websites; Art Galleries; Auction Houses (Catalogs/Price Lists); and Art Criticism. These collections will continue to grow and evolve over the course of the project, capturing thousands of websites and many terabytes of data.
As a child, Lisa Radha Weaver says she spent most Sunday afternoons at the Kitchener Public Library in Ontario. She has fond memories of the friendly library staff helping her load up as many books as she could carry home.
Then, as a college student at Trent and Queen’s Universities, Weaver again was struck by how kind and generous the people were behind the reference desk at the library. Finally, she asked: How do you get this job?
Weaver learned about the pathway to become a professional librarian. So, after finishing her undergraduate degree in education, she earned her master of library and information science at Western University in London, Ontario.
“I knew that I wanted to serve the public in the same way that I had always been served at all the libraries that I had the privilege of growing up with in the first half of my life,” said Weaver, now director of collections and program development at Hamilton Public Library (HPL) in Ontario.
But that public service role was tested in the spring of 2020 when HPL closed due to COVID-19, as she and her fellow library staff were left wondering how they were going to get books to members who were now locked out of their physical collection. Weaver had been instrumental in helping HPL become an early adopter of the Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program, which offers digital access to the physical books that a library owns. Because of the collections team’s hard work, HPL patrons had access to tens of thousands of books from the safety of their homes, and could continue to read and learn while the physical library remained closed.
Membership in the program includes national and regional art and museum libraries throughout the United States and Canada committed to the preservation of 21st century art historical resources on the web. One of our early supporters and current CARTA member Amelia Nelson, Director of Library and Archives at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, noted the increased risk of losing art history on the web in comparison to earlier generations of artists: “Websites are the letters, exhibition postcards, exhibition reviews and newspaper articles of today’s artists and artistic communities, but they aren’t resources that scholars can find in archives like the physical materials that document the careers of earlier generations of artists. I worry that as we lose these sites, we are also losing the potential for scholars to place this moment in the canon of art history and culture broadly. This initiative will build a accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database collaborative and sustainable way for art libraries to pool their limited resources, with the technical, administrative, and organizational expertise of the Internet Archive, to ensure that this content is available for future generations.”
The initial group of member institutions have identified an initial set of more than 150 valuable and at-risk websites, articles, and other materials on five primary collection topics: Local Arts Organizations; Artists Websites; Art Galleries; Auction Houses (Catalogs/Price Lists); and Art Criticism. These collections will continue to grow and evolve over the course of the project, capturing thousands of websites and many terabytes of data.
As a child, Lisa Radha Weaver says she spent most Sunday afternoons at the Kitchener Public Library in Ontario. She has fond memories of the friendly library staff helping her load up as many books as she could carry home.
Then, as a college student at Trent and Queen’s Universities, Weaver again was struck by how kind and generous the people were behind the reference desk at the library. Finally, she asked: How do you get this job?
Weaver learned about the pathway to become a professional librarian. So, after finishing her undergraduate degree in education, she earned her master of library and information science at Western University in London, Ontario.
“I knew that I wanted to serve the public in the same way that I had always been served at all the libraries that I had the privilege of growing up with in the first half of my life,” said Weaver, now director of collections and program development at Hamilton Public Library (HPL) in Ontario.
But that public service role was tested in the spring of 2020 when HPL closed due to COVID-19, as she and her fellow library staff were left wondering how they were going to get books to members who were now locked out of their physical collection. Weaver had been instrumental in helping HPL become an early adopter of the Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program, which offers digital access to the physical books that a library owns. Because of the collections team’s hard work, HPL patrons had access to tens of thousands of books from the safety of their homes, and could continue to read and learn while the physical library remained closed.