The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is certainly the greatest art institution in the United States and possibly even the planet. It got even greater on the weekend with the inauguration of MetPublications, an online service that allows users to peruse more than 600 catalogues and journals – 370 of them out-of-print titles – that the museum has published since 1964.
Eventually MetPublications will be the digital home of material dating to the museum's opening in 1872. Of course, other museums and galleries already offer similar online access but none compares to the Met, now and forever America's largest art institution, with more than two million artifacts in its permanent collection.
Yale University Press is helping out as well, agreeing to print, on-demand, paperbound editions, with colour reproductions, of 140 out-of-print Met books. www.metmuseum.org/research/metpublications.