Over the last seven years, the Los Angeles museum has developed the online resource which has more than 300 art and art history titles from Getty Publications that are free to download.
Art lovers can find a range of titles including the museum’s exhibition catalogues, conservation texts, and scholarly writings that can be read online or downloaded as PDF.
Books cover a variety of genres and artists, and are divided into titles relating to the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute.
While some books in the collection are still available for purchase through the Getty store, other retailers, or from libraries, many of them are no longer in print.
The initiative is helping to keep important and captivating books available even when they are no longer obtainable in physical form.
Each volume has been cleared for copyright issues, and can be used by individuals for private study, scholarship and research purposes.
The Virtual Library was launched in 2014, and since then has seen almost 400,000 downloads of its PDFs.
Art enthusiasts can also make use of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archive MetPublications offering more than 500 books for free download, and the Guggenheim also has some 200 books in its online database.