Somerset

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Producing the catalogues

Central to the production of catalogues in each county is The Public Catalogue Foundation's Catalogue County Coordinator. This person, usually recommended by a local museum or School of Art, researches the whereabouts of paintings, liaises with the people in charge of the collections and gathers the catalogue information for each painting. In a number of counties, the Catalogue County Coordinator is aided by NADFAS Heritage Volunteers who bring extensive local knowledge.

Creating the catalogues requires some painstaking detective work. Much information on the location and content of galleries can be found in the Museums and Galleries Yearbook and on the Internet. However, it is only through the generous guidance of local government and museum authorities that the Foundation can trace the art that hangs in spaces not normally accessible to the public. Thereafter, it is down to simple legwork: visiting town halls, council offices, fire stations, hospitals, law courts and elsewhere, to ensure that the catalogues are comprehensive.

Despite staff shortages in many of the institutions visited, the guardians of these public collections have warmly welcomed The Public Catalogue Foundation. Galleries and other authorities have worked with the Foundation's staff to arrange suitable times for paintings to be photographed, while curators have been enthusiastic about contributing to the cataloguing process. Interestingly, and in powerful reinforcement of the rationale for the whole project, The Public Catalogue Foundation has yet to find a collection that has photographed even the majority of its paintings, let alone all of them.

Photographing oil paintings in colour to catalogue standards is not simple. Whilst the Foundation would like to photograph paintings in situ, in many cases this is not practicable. Many paintings are above eye level, hanging on staircases or in tight spaces, or simply stacked in storerooms. This means that in some cases the Foundation needs to use imaginative methods of shooting photographs, or, with the guardian's approval, move the paintings to temporary photographic studios nearby. The Foundation uses freelance photographers who photograph principally in digital. The paintings are photographed glazed and framed. On a good day the photographers can photograph over 60 paintings.

Cataloguing data is collected on Excel spreadsheets from each collection and at the end of each county project loaded onto an Access database. The data and images are organised in a way that will make them easily searchable when the database goes on line.