II. History
In 1985 the Thesaurus Artis Universalis (TAU) committee of the International Committee for the History of Art (CIHA) envisioned a multilingual thesaurus of art and architecture terminology. From 1985 to 1989, the TAU committee conducted experiments to develop the methodology for the project, while the partner national institutions from the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain investigated the possibilities of obtaining funding for their portions of the project. In 1989 the Committee endorsed the use of the AAT as the base language for the project. By 1991 the nature and methodology of the project had changed. Because the scope of the AAT is broader than the mandates of the original five national institutions that participated in the TAU project, financial support for a project as large as a bilingual version of the entire AAT was difficult to obtain. In addition, the AAT and its parent organization, the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP)[4], had developed a strong network of partnerships with institutions with an active need for standard terminology in their own languages. These institutions were willing to release staff to work on specific vocabulary areas. Vocabulary specialists came to the AAT for week-long residencies, the purpose of which was to match the visiting specialists' thesauri to the AAT.The original goal of the AAT was to encourage the development of multilingual thesauri in the five CIHA languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. As Frederick Lancaster points out in his pivotal study, "The ability to handle publications in many languages and to accommodate several languages in the design of information services is becoming more important as truly international systems become operational."[5] To date, active interest in developing non-American English terminology has expanded from the first projects with French-speaking and British-English-speaking communities to include Italian and Spanish institutions. Colleagues in other countries are proceeding to establish working groups and funding for equivalency work. British English terminology is now incorporated into the AAT itself, and the methods for establishing British English equivalents to American English terminology parallel closely those for establishing equivalents in other languages.
4. The name of which was changed to Getty Information Institute in July 1996.
5. F. Wilfrid Lancaster, Vocabulary Control for Information Retrieval, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press, 1986), p. 218.
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