7th International Conference of Art Libraries

For the seventh time, the international network of art libraries will come together to hold its biannual conference, this year in Florence. The two-day program is covering a large spectrum of topics, ranging from the ongoing project Art Discovery Group Catalogue to questions around the preservation of art works and historical book collections in face of the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Flood in Florence. Speakers from 13 nations will give presentations on the topics’ various aspects as well as on projects, events and initiatives going on in art and museum libraries. The conference is both a meeting of the partner libraries joining the Art Discovery Group Catalogue project and an open access event focusing on topics around art and museum libraries of rather general interest.

The starting point of this conference format, born in 2004, was the necessity to bring together the growing group of European art libraries who have been participating in the ‘Virtual Catalogue or Art History’, launched in Germany in 1999. Over the first years, this light and rather simple solution in terms of technique and maintenance for connecting electronic library catalogues to one virtual search environment developed to an international cooperation network with a steadily growing number of partners. At the first conference in 2004, this group consisted already in 44 member libraries from four European countries. In the following years, the number of partner libraries grew up to more than 90 libraries in 14 countries on four continents. When in 2012 the virtual catalogue, meanwhile called artlibraries.net, has been replaced by a more up to date discovery solution, based on the OCLC WorldCat, the group of participating libraries changed both in number and composition. However, the before mentioned cooperation network remained.

One of the central topics in all six meetings of the last twelve years was the prospect on future developments in librarianship in general and in the art sector in particular. Also the upcoming conference in Florence will focus on related questions, concerning for instance the indexing of literature on art and art history under new conditions in terms of global collaboration (WorldCat) and changing methods such as machine based solutions for text analysis and data mining. The conference is a forum not only for correspondent presentations but first and foremost for discussions.