Considering the range of both the dictionary and the World Wide Web, the company says the new subscription service represents the quintessential meeting of content and context. According to the announcement, with The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, all of the thousands of extensively detailed entries from the print version can be found on a single Web site and cross referenced almost instantly, allowing users to move through the full text and conduct searches with ease. In addition, some 8,000 links to images at other Internet sources for the arts, including picture libraries and the collections of the world s leading museums and galleries, are already available, and more will be added continuously. Grove s has also entered into a partnership with the Bridgeman Art Library that will bring 100,000 new images to already existing links before the end of this year. Most importantly for a dictionary that covers a human endeavor as fast-changing as art and a panorama as broad as culture, The Grove Dictionary of Art Online will be regularly updated.
Initial plans call for quarterly updates, with monthly updates beginning soon.
Already some updates have been made, including reporting on the deaths of Roy Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning and brand new entries on artists Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. Ironically, when The Dictionary of Art came out in 1996, Grove s says many reviewers noted that an electronic version was simply not possible. For several reasons, wrote one news magazine, a work like this cannot be done online. A national newspaper reviewer noted as recently as 1997 that, Search engines aren t good enough yet to make the dictionary practical on the Internet. But the company says exploding growth and acceptance of Web technology over the past 2 years as well as powerful search engines, such as the dictionary s Excalibur, have made The Grove Dictionary of Art Online a reality.