Union List of Artist Names

Artists in the ULAN generally represent creators involved in the conception or production of visual arts and architecture.

[4] The ULAN grows and changes via contributions from the user community and editorial work of the Getty Vocabulary Program.

[5] The Getty thus distributed ULAN for broader use according to the tenets previously established for the construction and maintenance of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus: Its scope includes names needed to catalog and retrieve information about the visual arts and architecture; it is based on terminology that is current, warranted for use by authoritative literary sources, and validated by use in the scholarly art and architectural history community; and it is compiled and edited in response to the needs of the user community.

Originally constructed as a simple alphabetized "union list" of clustered artist names and biographies, in order to make it consistent with the AAT and Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, in the late 1990s ULAN was brought into compliance with national and international standards for thesaurus construction.

Its scope was broadened to include corporate bodies such as architectural firms and repositories of art, which may have hierarchical levels.

[6] The ULAN has been constructed over the years by numerous members of the user community and an army of dedicated editors, under the supervision of several managers.

It is now published in automated formats only, in both a searchable online Web interface and in data files available for licensing.