The making of a masterpiece

As Art20, Thames and Hudson's multimedia dictionary of modern art, finally appears in the shops, Claire Neesham reports on its difficult journey

Thames and Hudson's press release named Monday October 26 as the publication date of Art20, the long-awaited multimedia dictionary of modern art. A spokesperson admitted it might take a few days to reach the shops. But already the publisher is feeling the flush of success with this project, which is gaining positive reviews.

The CD has been a long time coming. It was advertised in the Thames and Hudson catalogue for the second half of 1996, but publication was soon postponed to spring 1997. This turned out to mean the end of May, but still no dictionary appeared. Development difficulties were mentioned, as publication slipped to September 1997 - though The THES did have a preview in May 1997. September brought the news that publication would be held up by a full year, to September 1998. This time rights negotiations were mentioned as a cause of the delay, though it now seems that the main problems were with software rather than the always difficult business of clearing rights with galleries and artists.

John Hawkins, director of Thames and Hudson Digital, admits that the Art20 project "took longer than expected", and explains that the text for the dictionary was finished three years ago. It was the integration of this text into the program that took the time.

"All the entry names are highlighted so, for instance, you can click on the name of a painting and a link will take you to an image of that painting." Another smart feature: every word apart from the very commonest ones can be selected, at which point a list of all the occurrences of that word in the dictionary will appear on the screen. "This involves a lot of coding," says Hawkins.

The international production team, which included French publishers Hazan, the French software house IDP, Italian and Spanish publishers and English language edition publishers Thames and Hudson, struggled to keep up with the many changes in operating software and multimedia tools that occurred during the five-year project. The target shifted from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 and then Windows 98; the Macintosh operating system was also evolving.

According to Hawkins, "rights are always a big issue". For this project the French publisher undertook to negotiate reproduction rights through agents or galleries. In addition, living artists had to be asked for permission to use their work. Hawkins says this was a big task. Rights owners agree. Sarah Pooley, marketing manager for the Bridgeman Art Library in London, says the terms negotiated with library and artist depend on language, territory, projected sales of the proposed publication, the size of the image and whether it will be black and white or colour. There is no standard contract.

A problem for electronic publications, Pooley says, is that the publishers often want to use more images than in a book. Art20 has 3,500 images, while the French paper publication upon which it was based contained 500 images.

Nat Price, marketing manager for the Grove Dictionary of Art, agrees - and has found a way round the problem. On November 16 Macmillan will publish the Grove Dictionary of Art Online. For Pounds 900 a year subscribers will have web access to the printed dictionary's 41,000 articles. They will be able to view those images for which the publishers hold the copyright. But rather than negotiating electronic rights for the 10,000 other images that were used in the paper dictionary, the publishers provide links to 5,000 free web sites where appropriate images are displayed.