OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports 1945-1946: Guide to Online PDFs and Searchable Texts - Part 1

OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit: Where (Online) to Find All of the Reports Published from 1945-1946

This is the first part in a multi-part survey of available online resources for consulting and searching the Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports in English.
(Unfortunately, we were not able to locate translations in French, German, Spanish, Italian or Russian. If you know of a resource that has translated the ALIU Reports and Red Flag Name list into languages other than English, please add in the comments.)

Status August 2017: The ALIU reports are held by NARA. Online researchers can find pieces of the ALIU Reports on a variety of sites - LootedArt.com, NARA, Fold3, Loyola, EHRI and dfs.ny.gov, but, at present, there does not seem to be one place where ALL of the contents can be downloaded and viewed both in photographs of the original report and in searchable and machine-readable text.

Art Museums in Germany, map from Wikidata

This map of art museums in Germany is generated by a Wikidata Query.
You can click on any dot to see the information about the museum.

Art Looting Investigation Unit: mentions of the Bauer Collection in the Final Report

What do the Art Looting Investigation Reports say about the looting of the Bauer Collection? How easy - or difficult - is it to access this information today, in 2017?

Can one search the archives via internet and retrieve the information?

Here is the result of a simple test: looking for information on the seizure of the Bauer collection in one of the ALIU Reports, the "Final Report". This report contains, notably, a list of names of suspected Nazi era operators.

WWII Era Provenance Research Projects PDF files

The following American museums have published WWII Era provenance information for selected artworks online in PDF files.


Philadelphia Museum of Art List of Collection Works That Changed Ownership In Continental Europe, 1933-1945 - no images (Archived version here)


Tacoma Art Museum (PDF published on the internet  in 2015: Archived version here)


Toledo Museum (PDF dated 2006: Archived version here)

Detroit Institute of Arts Provenance Listings (Archived Version here

https://web.archive.org/web/20100329015920/https://www.dia.org/art/provenance-listings.aspx)


The Guggenheim Museum collection : paintings, 1880-1945
by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Rudenstine, Angelica Zander; Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation  Publication date 1976 (Isbn 0892070021,Lccn 75037356,Oclc-id 185583502,Openlibrary_edition OL11297020M, Openlibrary_work OL8482129W

Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (PDF dated 9/10/2013 published on internet: Archived version here) This link appears to have been taken down since its publication.

To search in files, clink on link and hit Ctrl-F to call up the search box.

Archives and Wikipedia: can structured links help make resources easier to find?

Germany provides much interesting thinking on linking information. Below, Odendahl, posting on Open Edition, shares a suggestion for referencing archives on Wikipedia in an article entitled "Archivquellen einheitlich in der Wikipedia verlinken".  (click here for Google Translate).

We'd like, he says, to see our archives used.

Why not have an easy and yet rigorously formatted way to share archives?

The format that he suggests using in Wikipedia is:

{{Archivquelle
|sammlung=
|bestand=
|dossier=
|dokument=
|signatur=
|titel=
|datum=
|institution=
|link=
}}

It seems like this (or something like this) could be a very useful addition. 

Take, for example the International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property that is hosted by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI).  

Wouldn't it be nice to have a Wikipedia (and this Wikidata and Dbpedia) for each archive referenced, along with direct links to the database on Wikipedia? It might make it easier for people who don't know about EHRI or the Portal to find the information, and there doesn't seem to be any downside.

(As of this writing the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure had a Wikidata ID but not yet a Wikipedia page.)

What do you think?