How to create a catalogue raisonné team

A catalogue raisonné depends on more than research alone. Someone must define its scope, evaluate evidence, document decisions, coordinate people and budgets, organize data, manage images and rights, prepare the publication, and take responsibility for it after launch. Building the team is therefore not primarily a matter of filling a standard set of job titles. It means identifying the work the catalogue will require and assigning clear responsibility for each decision. A small project may combine several responsibilities in one position. A larger project may involve specialists in each area. In either case, every essential function needs a named owner.

A broader overview of the publication process is available in How to create a digital catalogue raisonné. This guide focuses specifically on the people, responsibilities, and forms of authority behind that process.

Aleksi Gallen-Kallela, Parisian Backyard, 1884, oil on canvas, 28 × 23 cm, Ateneum Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Ateneum Art Museum/Finnish National Gallery and Jenni Nurminen.

Define the publication before assigning roles

The team required for a catalogue of paintings by a deceased artist will differ from one documenting the evolving practice of a living artist. Revising an existing catalogue presents different demands from beginning with an uncatalogued archive. Print and digital publications also require different forms of production and long-term maintenance.

Before assigning roles, define what the catalogue will cover. This includes its dates, media, editions, variants, unfinished works, lost or destroyed works, and any categories of uncertain attribution. The project should also determine whether it will accept submissions from owners, examine works, publish scholarly opinions about authorship, issue certificates, or provide valuations. These are separate activities, and a catalogue does not need to perform all of them.

The team also needs to know whether the catalogue will be published once or in stages, which languages it will use, and whether records will continue to change after publication. Each decision creates responsibilities that must be reflected in the team.

Separate institutional, scholarly, and operational authority

Institutional, scholarly, and operational authority often coexist within a catalogue raisonné project.

Institutional leaders secure funding, approve major commitments, and represent the organization supporting the work. Scholarly leaders establish the research method and take responsibility for the catalogue’s conclusions. Operational leaders coordinate the people, information, schedules, and resources required to complete the work.

One person may hold more than one form of authority, especially in a small organization. The responsibilities should nevertheless be recorded separately. A board member who approves the budget does not automatically decide whether a work belongs in the catalogue. A project manager may organize an attribution review without determining its scholarly outcome.

Making these distinctions explicit protects the integrity of the research and gives contributors a clear route for questions, disagreements, and approvals.

Establish scholarly direction and decision-making procedures

The scholarly director or editor-in-chief is responsible for the intellectual coherence of the catalogue. This person defines its research methodology, inclusion criteria, entry structure, citation practices, terminology, and treatment of uncertainty.

Decisions about whether and how to include a work may belong to the scholarly director, an editorial board, an advisory group, or a formally constituted committee. The appropriate model depends on the artist, the available evidence, the sponsoring organization, and the project’s legal context.

Catalogue inclusion records a scholarly judgment under the project’s stated criteria and can carry significant consequences for how a work is understood. Whether that decision also constitutes a separate authentication opinion depends on the project’s published policy. The team should document what evidence it considers, who reviews it, how disagreements are handled, how conflicts of interest are disclosed, and when a conclusion may be reconsidered. The Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association’s guidance on scholarly opinions about authenticity provides a useful point of reference.

The scholarly lead does not need to possess every form of expertise. Their responsibility is to bring the relevant evidence and specialists together, weigh their findings, and ensure that the catalogue distinguishes documented information from interpretation, probability, and unresolved questions.

Assign responsibility for research and documentation

Researchers establish the catalogue’s evidentiary foundation. Their work may involve examining artworks, tracing provenance, reconstructing exhibition and publication histories, locating correspondence, reviewing auction records, conducting interviews, and comparing earlier catalogues and inventories.

Some projects divide these subjects among specialists. Others assign individual researchers responsibility for groups of works. Either approach can succeed if the team defines what may be entered provisionally, what requires further review, and who approves the final record.

Researchers also need shared conventions for recording names, dates, measurements, sources, quotations, and uncertainty. When a conclusion changes, the record should preserve what changed, why it changed, and which evidence informed the revision.

A project concerning a living artist may also need someone to coordinate communication with the artist, studio, family, fabricators, galleries, and former assistants. Firsthand testimony can be invaluable, but it should remain an attributed source considered alongside contemporary records and material evidence.

Bring together object, archival, and technical expertise

Archivists, registrars, collections managers, conservators, and conservation scientists contribute different forms of evidence.

An archivist preserves the context and organization of documentary records. A registrar or collections manager may contribute information about objects, locations, loans, institutional records, and ownership histories. Their knowledge can be particularly important when research materials are distributed across several collections.

A conservator examines materials, techniques, condition, alterations, and conservation history. Technical photography, imaging, microscopy, or scientific analysis may clarify how a work was made and how its physical characteristics compare with other works.

Technical evidence can inform dating and attribution, but a conservator does not determine authorship alone. The catalogue team must consider material findings alongside provenance, archival documentation, visual analysis, and the history of the artist’s practice.

Not every project needs each specialist as a permanent team member. The important question is who recognizes when their expertise is required, commissions the work, evaluates its relevance, and preserves its findings with the rest of the research.

Make data an editorial responsibility

A catalogue raisonné contains both data and scholarly arguments. Decisions about how information is structured affect what researchers can record and what readers will later be able to find, compare, and understand.

A data editor or documentation specialist establishes field definitions, identifiers, naming rules, controlled vocabularies, and procedures for handling duplicate or conflicting information. They also help ensure that works, people, institutions, exhibitions, publications, transactions, and archival sources remain connected consistently.

This work should be developed with the scholarly team rather than delegated as a purely administrative task. The project’s treatment of uncertainty, attribution, evidence, and change must be reflected in its records. The introductions to metadata for art researchers and standardized data in digital catalogues raisonnés explain the principles behind this work.

If the catalogue contains extensive photography, scans, and technical images, someone must also take responsibility for master files, derivatives, identifiers, permissions, credit lines, and preservation. Digital asset management for catalogues raisonnés considers these responsibilities in greater detail.

Address rights, privacy, and publication early

Rights and reproductions work should begin while sources and images are being gathered. The responsible person identifies copyright holders, requests permissions, documents licences, maintains credit lines, and records restrictions attached to individual materials.

Privacy requires separate consideration. Research records may contain addresses, financial information, private correspondence, ownership details, or information about living people. A project may need legal or data-protection advice concerning what it collects, retains, shares internally, or publishes.

Legal permission is not the only consideration. Sensitive provenance, culturally restricted information, and knowledge connected to Indigenous communities may require additional consultation. Public access should be an editorial and governance decision, not an automatic consequence of digitization.

Publication also requires editorial work. Copy editing, translation, image preparation, proofreading, design, accessibility, and web production may be undertaken by staff or commissioned externally. Each contributor needs access to the project’s terminology and a clear process for raising questions without silently changing the meaning of the scholarship.

Define digital responsibility in plain language

A digital catalogue needs someone who can translate scholarly requirements into decisions about the database, images, research interface, public website, exports, access permissions, backups, security, accessibility, and future maintenance.

This person might be called a digital project lead, data manager, or systems specialist. They do not necessarily need to write code. They do need to understand how the different parts of the publication fit together and who is responsible for maintaining them.

The role includes coordinating developers, designers, hosting providers, or institutional technology teams. It also includes retaining documentation, controlling essential accounts, testing changes, and ensuring that data and images can be exported if the project’s technical arrangements change.

The chosen digital approach will affect how much responsibility remains within the organization. A guide to choosing a digital strategy for your catalogue raisonné compares purpose-built platforms, assembled systems, and custom development from this perspective.

Give project management its own authority

The project manager turns the research plan into coordinated work. They maintain the schedule and budget, organize meetings, document decisions, manage contracts, track dependencies, and identify risks.

Project management should remain distinct from scholarly authority. The project manager ensures that the decision-making process functions, while the designated scholarly role makes the scholarly decision. If one person performs both functions, the project plan should still distinguish between them.

Staff time is one of the largest and most persistent costs of a catalogue raisonné. A credible budget should connect each responsibility to a project phase, an estimated duration, and an expected level of effort. This relationship between staffing, publication, and long-term maintenance is examined in Planning a sustainable digital catalogue raisonné budget.

Combine roles carefully in a small team

Roles do not need to correspond to separate people. A scholar might serve as project director, principal researcher, and scholarly editor. An archivist might also manage data standards. A project manager might coordinate rights requests and external suppliers. Conservation, legal, translation, design, and technical expertise may be commissioned when needed.

Combining responsibilities becomes risky when it eliminates meaningful review, creates an undisclosed conflict of interest, or leaves essential knowledge with one person. Consequential decisions benefit from a documented second perspective where resources permit. Research methods, data conventions, passwords, contracts, and publication procedures should also be accessible to more than one trusted team member.

External advisers can fill genuine gaps, but an adviser is not a substitute for an accountable member of the project. Someone within the team must frame the question, provide the relevant material, assess the result, and preserve it with the project documentation.

Plan for the catalogue after publication

The balance of work changes throughout the life of a catalogue. Early planning emphasizes scholarly direction, archival assessment, project management, fundraising, and technical decisions. Research and cataloguing become more intensive as works and sources are assembled. Rights, editing, design, accessibility, and production require greater attention as publication approaches. After launch, someone must receive corrections and submissions, evaluate new evidence, update records, maintain digital files, and manage technical changes. The person who will assume these responsibilities should be involved before the publication is handed over.

Staff changes are also predictable in a long project. Each major responsibility needs documentation and a succession plan. A new colleague should be able to understand the catalogue’s scope, methods, outstanding questions, data conventions, rights position, and decision history without reconstructing them from email.

Create a responsibility map

A responsibility map turns the proposed team into a working structure. For every recurring activity or decision, record who completes the work, who has final authority, who must be consulted, where the evidence is kept, and who can assume responsibility if the primary person is unavailable. The map should address scholarly inclusion, object examination, uncertain information, submissions, image selection, rights clearance, terminology, data structure, publication approval, corrections, security, migration, and maintenance. It should also indicate which decisions require a committee, outside specialist, institutional approval, or legal review. Review this map whenever the project changes phase, adds a partner, loses a staff member, or alters its publication plan. Responsibility that appeared clear at the beginning can become ambiguous as the work expands.

A strong team is defined by clarity

There is no universal catalogue raisonné team. The appropriate structure depends on the artist, the surviving evidence, the scope of the publication, the supporting organization, and the resources available. Begin by writing down the decisions the catalogue will require. Assign an owner to each form of work, distinguish advisers from decision-makers, and identify where outside expertise is necessary. Then test the structure against the full life of the publication, including the years after launch. A clear team structure does more than keep a project on schedule. It makes the production of scholarship accountable. Readers may never see the responsibility map, but they encounter its consequences in the consistency of the records, the treatment of uncertainty, the quality of the evidence, and the durability of the publication.