Online Documentation
Online databases of local and regional public art emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. Aside from electronic archives at national libraries (such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum), online public art databases are usually specific to individual cities or public agencies (such as transit authorities) and are therefore geographically limited. A few web-based databases have emerged from efforts to provide more regionally comprehensive online public art lists, such as the Public Art in Public Places Project, completed in 2010 for the Los Angeles and Southern California area and providing information on thousands of public artworks.
Other online database efforts have focused on particular public art forms, such as sculptures or murals. From 1992-1994 Heritage Preservation funded the survey project Save Outdoor Sculpture!, whose acronym SOS! references the international Morse code distress signal, "SOS". This project documented more than 30,000 sculptures in the United States. The records of this survey are available in the SOS! Database.
Starting in 2009, WikiProject Public art has worked to document public art around the globe. While this project received significant attention within the academic community, it remains relatively obscure.
On 31 August 2012 Alfie Dennen re-launched the Big Art Mob project and was given control of the project from previous administrators Channel 4. The Big Art Mob in it's new incarnation shifted focus from mapping the United Kingdom's Public Art to mapping the whole world's and gained instant widespread global press. At launch the site has over 12,000 pieces of public art mapped with over 600 new works mapped as of 05/09/2012.
At the national level the Public Art Archive™ is an online cataloging effort whose aim is to document public art collections in the United States, primarily those held by state and municipal Percent for Art and Art in Public Places programs, as well as outdoor sculpture and public art held by U.S. federal, private, non-profit, foundation, campus, transit, and other such related entities. A project of the Western States Arts Federation, a non-profit arts service organization, the Public Art Archive™ is the first comprehensive online database to centralize the documentation and broaden the access to public art collections which remain largely hidden due to their lack of, or buried, web-based presence on government websites. On September 2012 the Public Art Archive™ extended its reach to include Canada in its online documentation of public art collections.
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