The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a virtual bibliographic resource based on the catalogues of over 70 art and museum libraries. Its future is closely linked to the question of technically and topically innovative data concepts on the one hand and to new retrieval and analysis procedures on the other. Will it be possible to interpret both the quantity and the diversity of the data in a more future-oriented and efficient way for scientific questions than traditional catalogues do?

Article The Futurism Archive of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut was published on May 1, 2013 in the journal International Yearbook of Futurism Studies (volume 3, issue 1).

The temporary cessation to publication of the leading and most comprehensive bibliography in the arts, the International bibliography of art (formerly Bibliography of the history of art) in 2009, led to a lively debate on the future of art bibliography. Many scholars, librarians and information specialists were in favour of saving the established model and of ensuring its continuing existence. At the same time there arose the controversial and much-debated question of whether the traditional model of the IBA – grounded in an intellectual analysis of documents (articles from journals, monographs, exhibition catalogues, etc.) and their description with standardised metadata and abstracts – still corresponds to the needs of modern research on the one hand and to the new potentialities and realities of displaying, connecting, exchanging and gaining information in digital data networks on the other. Library catalogues play a decisive role in this consideration: unlike bibliographies, which follow traditional and more or less unvaried standards, they have mutated to a great degree from inflexible registers to dynamic networks. They enrich and connect the bibliographic information with additional data, they invite the user to tag and to review the corresponding literature and they enable complex forms of unforeseeable discovery. Thus the ‘crisis’ into which art bibliography was plunged when the old IBA ceased publication, at the same time opened up the opportunity to discuss alternative, future-oriented solutions for the appropriate format of bibliographic information supply in the arts today.

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The paper describes two different ways of accessing a collection of Florentine coats of arms, which was digitised and made available on the Web. One way is a traditional approach: textual description and indexing. As heraldry uses a specific and complex terminology the textual approach seemed alright for experts but insufficient for laypersons. Therefore an additional retrieval mode was chosen which is based on the visual specification by users of the content of images representing the coat of arms. This access mode allows users who are not familiar with heraldry to access the collection.

The history of the library founded in 1897 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence is marked by a very close connection with the history and profile of the Institute itself. The demand for scientific literature for research on Florentine Renaissance art and culture was the key motivation for establishing a German research library in Florence, where this art and culture flourished. But from the very beginning the holdings covered Italian art as a whole, not just the Renaissance and Florentine art. The acquisition policy as well as the internal organisation and systematic structure of the library have right up to the present day mirrored the research activities of the Institute and its scholars. With the founding of a consortium of the three German research libraries in Florence, Munich (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte) and Rome (Bibliotheca Hertziana) in 1994, a new era began. High-profile bibliographic information, additional services and the integration of the library in Florence into this co-operative network became a further characteristic of the existing identity of the Institute and its library, which were – and continue to be – closely tied to Florence and Tuscany.