The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, recently launched its first digital catalogue. It features 106 French paintings and pastels, including the 29 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection given to the museum in 2015. The French Paintings Catalogue can be found on the museum’s website, www.nelson-atkins.org/fpc, where high-resolution images and rich historical context about each painting are freely accessible to all. We launched the catalogue with four paintings, an essay on the history of collecting, and a fun timeline that highlights significant historic events in Kansas City and at the museum. We will add more painting entries each month, sharing new insights and discoveries.

At the core of our digital publication, is the Getty’s Quire framework, upon which we built a more robust, searchable platform for an extensive catalogue. Through the incorporation of an adjustable reading space and image viewer, along with enhanced footnotes and glossary terms, we have created an accessible publication. Collection-wide and individual essays and our custom-built timeline guide the reader through the museum’s French paintings collection. We hope by offering our NAMA theme on GitHub that we can help Quire become an institutional standard for the digital humanities. https://github.com/Nelson-Atkins-Museum/NAMA-Quire-Theme