Ongoing American project, belonging to the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP), intended as the first comprehensive thesaurus for the fields of art and architecture. Its aims are to promote consistency and compatibility among art-historical databases by providing a standardized, controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic and visual databases and in the documentation of object collections. The AAT’s terminology, arranged both alphabetically and hierarchically by concept, reflects the ‘common usage’ of scholars and cataloguers. Advisory boards composed of experts in the fields of architecture, decorative and fine arts, along with archivists and information managers in these fields, have reviewed and approved terminology for inclusion in the thesaurus.
The AAT was founded by Dora Crouch, Pat Molholt (b 19 Oct 1943) and Toni Petersen (b 13 May 1933) and was housed first at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and then at Bennington College in Bennington, VT. Initial work (...