Murtha Baca

She led a team of scholars and technical experts that developed the Getty Research Institute's first "born-digital" scholarly publication, Pietro Mellini's Inventory in Verse, 1681: A Digital Facsimile with Translation and Commentary, published in 2015.

This digital edition was a landmark project in the field of digital art history, which has since grown considerably.

She was also a noted and well-published translator of Italian texts on literature and cuisine.

Baca was a leader in various professional organizations and groups related to controlled vocabularies, descriptive metadata, and digital art history.

Murtha Baca (born California, October 7, 1950 - deceased Granada Hills, California, August 12, 2023) was an American educator and professional renowned in the field of information science, particularly for her expertise in the area of metadata and digital information systems.

Baca received a PhD in Art History and Italian Language and Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Baca was hired at the Getty Information Institute in 1988 and transferred to the Getty Research Institute in 1999.

Baca was a founding member and leader of the Getty Vocabulary Program, which builds and maintains multilingual controlled vocabularies for art, architecture, and material culture.

Her association with the Getty Vocabulary Program spanned three decades.

Baca also worked in the Getty Provenance Index and held various other titles at the Getty Research Institute, including Head of Digital Art History and Head of Digital Resources Management.

She accrued three decades of experience as an implementer and teacher of descriptive metadata and controlled vocabularies for art and architecture.

She was a Lecturer at the UCLA Department of Information Studies from 1988 to 2017, teaching graduate seminars in Indexing & Thesaurus Construction and Metadata.

She was a mentor to many students, several of whom later worked with her in the field.

Baca authored, edited, and co-edited numerous academic publications throughout her career.

She was a co-editor of Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (American Library Association) which "gives the cataloger tools to describe art, images, and cultural objects consistently" and "can be used as a model for evolving cataloging codes."

She was chair of the International Terminology Working Group, an organization of cultural heritage documentation professionals founded ca. 1988 to work with multilingual thesauri.

She served on the board of directors of the Museum Computer Network (MCN) from 2004 to 2006, the Advisory Board of the Built Works Registry (2010-2014), the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Education (HIVE) advisory Board (2011), and as a technical advisor to the Digital Serlio Project (2010-2018).

She was the editor of Introduction to Metadata (Getty Research Institute, 3rd edition, 2016), which "presents an overview of metadata, including the methods, tools, and standards that support the access and use of digital resources on the web" and serves as "a recommended resource for information professionals in museums, libraries, and archives who are interested in developing a foundation in metadata concepts and practices."