May 10, 2001

Dear Colleague:

This email is to inform you that the Print Council of America has completed
its on-line database of oeuvre catalogues of European and American
printmakers.  The Index to Print Catalogues Raisonné (IPCR) is available
free of charge via the Internet and can be searched by pointing your
browser to www.printcouncil.org and selecting "Search Oeuvre Catalogues."

IPCR contains information and bibliographic citations on over 13,000
printmakers and their work.  More than 5,000 publications, ranging in date
from the eighteenth century to 2001, were examined and indexed for
inclusion in the database. IPCR includes material compiled by Timothy Riggs
and published in 1983 as <The Print Council Index to Oeuvre-Catalogues of
Prints by European and American Artists> as well as supplemental
information on print catalogues raisonné published since the completion of
Riggs.

Because of the supplemental material, the information in IPCR
adds a new dimension to the familiar brown and gold reference volume used
in many print rooms and art libraries.  For example, the artist William
Blake (1757-1827) was listed in Riggs with six citations, but now
has eleven.  New artist names and their relevant publications have also
been added. The artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and his three citations
(all published after 1982) will be found in IPCR even though Matisse is not
listed in the bound version of Riggs.  Additionally, we have updated and
corrected artists' birth and death dates, added nationality information,
and introduced searchable variations on artist-name spellings.

Much scholarly work on American printmakers and on twentieth-century
artists has been completed in recent decades.  IPCR contains
numerous entries for artists in these two research areas and should prove
useful to a whole set of scholars previously unfamiliar with the Riggs
bibliography.  In addition, several post-1980 multi-artist compilations,
such as the New Hollstein series, <The Illustrated Bartsch>, and portions
of the Bibliothèque nationale's <Inventaire du fonds français>, have been
indexed into IPCR.

The Print Council has plans to add future publications to IPCR in annual
research cycles, keeping the database as current and up-to-date as
possible.  The possibility of broadening the parameters of the database to
include geographical regions beyond the Americas and Europe is also being
considered.

One caveat, in closing, a few links in the "Notes" and "Help" section of
the website are still under construction.  We expect to have all links
fully operational shortly and apologize for any inconvenience.

We hope that IPCR will prove to be a useful resource to the field and will
greatly assist scholars and students. I look forward to hearing any
feedback you may have on the database.

Sincerely,
Lauren B. Hewes
Project Bibliographer, Oeuvre Catalogue Project, Print Council of America