London Museum holds a library collection of 28,000 volumes. Traditionally used only by staff as a research resource, the Library has now the opportunity to transform its service as the organisation prepares to open a brand new museum. One of the consequent streams of work taking place is the audit and recataloguing of the complete library collection. Due to the nature of the holdings (and some historical developments), this is happening in two collections management systems, the library’s and the museum’s. This article looks at the complexities and the opportunities that this dual recording brings.
How can a uniform approach be applied to art archives with different origins? How can an artist’s personal library be arranged, classified, and made available to users? Is there a digital strategy that effectively addresses the unique requirements of different materials? What challenges arise during the process and how can they be confronted? These and other questions were considered at the outset of three projects at the Art Library at Fundación Juan March: the legacy of an artist, a collective archive of artists, and the historical archive of the exhibitions department. In this article, we undertake a journey through each of the projects, highlighting and reflecting about the most relevant aspects of their management, showcasing some of the materials, explaining the processes undertaken and our vision for future work.
The Library of the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España 1 (Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute) is one of the most important libraries specialized in the conservation and restoration of cultural heritage. Its collection, originated in 1990 after the merger of predecessor institutions, contains more than 50,000 publications, including books, exhibition catalogues, conference proceedings, and specialized journals. Its architectural design, 2 by architects Fernando Higueras and Antonio Miró, is a prominent example of brutalism, with a circular structure that integrates vegetation, and was inaugurated in 1990. Throughout its history, the library has maintained an approach prioritizing open access for both internal and external users, and offering services such as in-room consultation, internal loans, document reproduction, and specialized bibliographies. In recent years, its activity has grown, reflecting an expansion of services and staff. Among future projects are the digitization of collections, subscription to electronic journals, and integration of its catalogue into various national and international bibliographic networks, such as BCIN. 3 These efforts aim to solidify the library as a leading institution in cultural heritage documentation preservation and dissemination, adapting to modern trends in library science and user experience. This article is an adaptation of the communication presented at the 10 th International Conference of Art Libraries held in Museo Nacional de Arte de Cataluña (Barcelona, Spain) on October 3-5 th 2024.
The Library and Documentation Centre of the MNCARS is a specialised research centre that collects and preserves books and documentation on artists and artistic movements from 1881 to the present day. Despite the specific nature of this library and the uniqueness of its holdings, access to its collections is open not only to researchers, but also to the general public. Far from considering this situation as a threat, it was seen as an opportunity and was one of the reasons for the birth of Casi libros (Almost Books). Almost Books is the Library’s public programme and proposes an approach to its spaces, collections and services going beyond its nature as a centre for research into contemporary art. The programme, implemented since 2021, understands the Library as a reflective and participatory space, promoting links between visitors and its documentary and artistic collections. Its lines of action - some developed inside the Library, others outside its walls - are based on the book and the document as common central elements, generating different projects, such as: Outros libros, y eso (Other Books and So), a narrative and essay reading club; Aguja imantada (Magnetised Needle), a programme of visits to the documentary exhibitions of Space D and the Library’s facilities, Mirar de cerca (Look Closely), a user training programme based on the collections held by the centre, and Salirse del Margen (Leave the Margin), a series of guided tours of the museum collection based on readings of books and documents stored in the Library. The innovative and plural nature of this programme has been recognised externally (Consejo de Cooperación Bibliotecaria/Council for Library Cooperation Seal finalist project 2022). The experiences and the feedback gained during the development of this library outreach programme have enabled us to identify strengths and weaknesses that will be adressed in the coming years in order to make the Almost Books project more coherent, solid and cohesive in the future.
What happens when responsibility devolves upon a library for a wider institution’s heritage pictures and sculptures, albeit with neither additional resources nor art-historical knowledge to care for them? The situation is, if not the norm, by no means unique. At the central University of London art joined the rare books portfolio. How did we cope? This article describes the sort of artwork under consideration, how we catalogued it and why, what we did on the website, and how we could turn a potential burden into an asset, not only by using the art to strengthen corporate identity, but by exploiting it as visual signposts to library strengths. An overall spotlight is now on issues of ethnicity, diversity and inclusion, and art is becoming important to show the University’s values. As the profile of the pictures increased, so did the library profile within the University. Ultimately, it made sense for librarians to care for the art collection.
Fashion ephemera, encompassing items such as lookbooks, invitations, show notes, and promotional materials, presents numerous challenges for cultural institutions seeking to collect and preserve this material. Although many museums have examples of this material in their archives, International Library of Fashion Research (ILFR), in Oslo, Norway, is the first public library to centre its collections around fashion ephemera. Positioned as a fashion library, ILFR therefore offers a unique approach, which foregrounds the materiality and tangibility of the objects in their collection, beyond their initial function as supplementary documentation of fashion industry events and outputs. This article examines the complexities of integrating fashion ephemera into library collections, the significance of the library in mediating access to this type of material, and the critical role ephemera can play in fashion research.
Artificial Intelligence or machine learning is something that the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector cannot avoid. There are many examples of it being used for translation, transcription, and keywording of existing data, but can it be used to deal with challenging terminology, or to enhance physical access to our collections? At the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), projects are underway to use machine learning tools to analyse and flag potentially problematic terminology and to enhance access to stored collections by generating fragility ratings based on collections data.
The work of making library collections and services more equitable is not a one-off task, but one that needs constant review and revision as perspectives and expectations change in the wider culture. Examples include three recent issues that have arisen in connection with Sotheby’s Institute of Art’s in-house book classification scheme: our use of the concepts of the Dutch Golden Age, MENA/SWANA, and the Global South/Global North. An awareness of relevant trends in contemporary thought, and a willingness to examine critically how best to respond to such trends, support librarians in offering the best service they can to their patrons.
The semantic web promises interlinks of cultural heritage objects, both original and digital, of which the Smithsonian Institution (SI) holds plenty in artifacts, books, audio/video, etc. At the core, structured data in RDF is likely the one member of data infrastructure that carries the major lifting for interlinking. Parsing millions of bibliographic data mainly locked in MARC21 into the BIBFRAME/RDF syntax is not an insignificant endeavour for the library community. The Smithsonian Libraries & Archives, a network of specialized libraries (including art and design), is not an exception. It became part of the Share Family to utilize its technology so as to increase user resource discovery and the library staff’s ability to resource curations. Working collaboratively with scores of research, academic and national libraries, and the Share Family team, the Smithsonian Libraries & Archives experimented with BIBFRAME, a Library of Congress RDF-based ontology, which has benefited greatly from the Share-VDE semantic technology and its system design. From such efforts, the Smithsonian Libraries & Archives looks to move away from the web of documents into a web of data. Fulfilling SI’s strategic vision of availing collections through digital solutions for the increase and diffusion of human knowledge.
Art librarians work with images. It’s one of the things that separates us from many of our fellow subject librarians. As the academy continues to grapple with the benefits, drawbacks, and effects of AI, art librarians are uniquely positioned to teach students how to critically engage with AI image generators. Considerations concerning copyright, bias in datasets, formal analysis, and AI image generators’ potential as an art medium are some examples of topics that art librarians have at their disposal.
Today, social media has become an essential part of both private and professional life, especially in cultural institutions such as museum libraries. Museum libraries have recognized the importance of social media as a fast and constant source of information. With their increasing presence, employees in museum libraries have realized the need to determine which social networks are used and for what purposes. Social media allows for active, but virtual, interaction and provides new opportunities for developing intercultural collaborations. Social media technologies include: text messages, illustrations, photos, animations, music, and audio-video content. By using social media, individuals are able to express their opinion to a wide public, so they are, more than ever, relying on intercultural communication and cooperation.
The GESAH Graphic Arts Ontology (GESAH GAO) was developed to describe works of art on paper such as prints and drawings. The design was guided by the content-related, specialized needs of the domain experts, as well as the requirement to record the data in a structured manner in order to enable subsequent use and to ensure technical connectivity to current and future developments. The ontology models cultural objects by means of activities related to them (creation, production, inscription, preservation, exhibition etc.), people/organizations and their roles, subjects depicted and other relevant concepts. It incorporates concepts from upper ontologies such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and reuses classes and properties from ontologies such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF), VIVO, and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). With TIB SAH digital, we show the reference implementation of the GESAH GAO. It was constructed using the open-source knowledge graph suite Vitro, which provides custom entry forms for cataloguing and public access to the digitized collection.
Academic research libraries that build and steward collections in support of art research are always developing and executing strategies for their physical and virtual spaces, preservation, and access. NYU Libraries’ Institute of Fine Arts Library welcomes readers of a wide range of expertise, subject focus, and languages and works to make the library collections easier to discover and use in more creative ways in the pursuit of research, teaching, and learning. This work raises the question, whom do librarians turn to when they are responsible for subject areas or languages they may not know? This article concerns collection development at NYU Libraries’ Institute of Fine Arts Library focusing on the African American and Black Diaspora, Asian, and Latin American & Caribbean art collections as distinct collections within a larger art library setting. In addition, it provides ways libraries can implement collection development policies that prioritize materials by underrepresented groups and offer community engagement with partners focused on inclusion, diversity, belonging, equity, and accessibility.
This article explores how the National Poetry Library has developed its historic collection of vinyl LPs over the course of four years, describing the challenges of balancing the preservation of audio objects with their accessibility and discoverability, and examining the opportunities this unique collection presents in building new audiences.
The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) is an ethical, open source, artist-driven database of artist books and publications. DAAP recently received Heritage Lottery Funding to support the Women's Art Library (WAL) to build their own archives on the platform. Through a series of workshops, tutorials and drop-ins, artists represented in the WAL generated anecdotal, ‘gossipy’ histories which act as access points to artists’ books that may be out of print, limited in availability within institutional or public archives or libraries, or shared digitally for the first time. I will draw on a selection of records – an archive of examples – from the Women's Art Library on the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing to show how the database evolves in response to artists’ needs. These gorgeous, unruly catalogue records trouble, disrupt and bend metadata for queer use.1
This article provides a comprehensive review of Salt's approach to knowledge generation in art history, focusing on its role as a cultural institution in Turkey. The text explores the function of research institutions and the evolving role of archivists in preserving and disseminating knowledge to a broader user base. The paper examines the concept of the archive within the framework of transparency and contingency, specifically by reviewing chosen research and archival projects conducted by the institution. It elucidates diverse research methodologies employed in the analysis, representation, and availability of archival materials in these endeavors, underscoring the significance of user engagement in expanding knowledge.
Reclassifying a library is something which many librarians have tackled over the years. However, the task is always done with the technology and services available at the time of conversion. This is an account of reclassification using a modern Library Management System (ALMA), alongside our comments and tips on the sheer practicalities of moving every single book to another shelf location; all done, in our case, under the pall of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Based on the open-source IIIF image viewer Mirador 3, the Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - arthistoricum.net, in cooperation with NFDI4Culture, the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage, provides a platform for collaborative exploration of image resources. Within the virtual research environment, users can create their own workspaces and image collections individually or in groups, share them for collaborative efforts, and jointly create persistent annotations. This article outlines the development and integration process of this web-based research platform and highlights future areas of improvement.
A Parisian public library specializing in decorative arts, the Bibliothèque Forney is considered one of the first public lending art libraries in France. From the library's opening in the nineteenth century to the year 2000, readers could borrow art images to use as models or sources of inspiration. Today a selection of art plates are still freely accessible. The history of this unique service highlights the librarians’ efforts to meet the evolving needs of researchers looking for easily accessible art; their work to keep up with modernity; and their efforts to add value for their users.
