Review: Artists of the World

The new edition of the “Artists of the World” database has some improvements compared to the older “Artists of the World Online” edition. Still it is a commercial database locking out most people.

Among the improvements:

• many duplicate entry IDs from ‘‘Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon’’ (Nuremberg Artists’ Encyclopaedia) in the old database seem to throw a HTTP 404 if they are requested in the new one (example old, example new) and can be found under the same ID like the AKL/Thieme-Becker articles in the old one (example)
• new entries for groups (example) with a new ID pattern
• buttons for machine translation of sections “VITA” and “LIFE AND WORK” into English
• definitions for many occupations via tooltip/click
• “Name Variations” sources in literature via tooltip/click
• “Places of Activity” map using OpenStreetMap data
• linked GND IDs for some entries (example), some of them are invalid though (example)
• new fields for some entries:
  • “Last edited” (example)
  • “Member of” (example)
  • “Members” (example; clicking “Coellen, Johann von” from there leading to ID 10167252T1 strangely shows the article text for the family instead of the one for the person as opposed to clicking on ID 10167252T1 directly)
  • “Founded”/“Disbanded” (example)
• renamings:
  • “Geographical data” → “Places of Activity”
  • “Date cited” → more precisely either “Active”: “From”/“Until” or “First mentioned”/“Last mentioned”
  • “Place cited” → “First place mentioned”/“Last place mentioned”
• breakdown of “Sources” into “Thieme-Becker, Vollmer, and AKL”, “Other encyclopedias”, “Printed sources” and “Online sources”
• somewhat arbitrary groups of translations of places of birth and death and places cited in the old database are monolingual German in the new one
• removal of redundant occupations? (at least this case: old/new)
• new layout with left-side navigation and two column tabular biographical data
• changed search including instant results, display of date/place of birth/death in results

Some issues with the data:

• Since some point in July 2025 many dates of birth give “1 January” and the year. This was not the case before and pretends wrong precision.
• Many duplicated entries, among them
  • many duplicate entry IDs from ‘‘Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon’’ (Nuremberg Artists’ Encyclopaedia) that still have not been merged;
  • duplicates that seem to caused by the lack of a standard how to split names into first and last names (examples: 1/2; 1/2);
  • those caused by missing data or missing comparison of birth and married names.
• Erroneous markers on the map for locations mostly caused by ambiguous text strings for those locations.