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.

The Future of Art Bibliography (FAB) initiative developed out of various conversations among colleagues in the United States and Europe. Events in the art historical community, including limited funding resources for art libraries and projects internationally, and the cessation of the Getty’s support for the production of the Bibliography of the history of art (BHA) provided the catalyst for the Kress Foundation grant to the Getty Research Institute. A series of international meetings of art librarians, art historians, publishers and information specialists ensued. The goal was to review current practices, take stock of changes, and seriously consider developing more sustainable and collaborative ways of supporting the bibliography of art history in the future.

Multiple stakeholders in the scholarly publication and bibliographic lifecycle contribute to a complex network of complementary resources and services. Together, they provide a range of high-value products and services to researchers in our field. Increasingly however, the bibliographic record fails to include emergent forms and formats of scholarship, as well as relevant content beyond the traditionally circumscribed art historical domain. As a community, we need not only to develop strategies to expand and enhance the bibliographic boundary, but also to develop systems and toolkits that allow researchers to more dynamically contribute to the bibliographic enterprise.

artlibraries.net, formerly the VKK, is an international specialised meta catalogue allowing the integrated retrieval of bibliographic records and, should the occasion arise, other objects from distinctive art historical databases. This article analyses artlibraries.net from a functional point of view, but also discusses the cataloguing and subject indexing practice prevailing in art libraries internationally. It aims to identify some parameters for the future of art bibliography.

NYARC is a consortium of New York art resources, initially including the libraries of Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan was not part of the Arcade (integrated libraries system) programme funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and withdrew its designation as a NYARC entity in December 2010. This article gives a brief history of NYARC and examines whether it achieved its aims of sharing resources, making them more accessible to the public, and saving money.

The new AGORHA database at the INHA in Paris gives access to numerous information resources of value to art history researchers internationally. These include the catalogues of the Institute’s Library and its Jacques Doucet collection, which record the details of its heritage collections and archives, and the entire run of the Répertoire d’art et d’archéologie (1910-1972). It also hosts an increasing number of research databases that are a product of the research and teaching activities of the Galerie Colbert, which works in partnership with specialist education bodies throughout France. AGORHA will be online on the web by the time this article is published.

From the 1970s onwards Danish contributions were sent to the international art bibliography published by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Broader Nordic co-operation began when the Bibliography of the history of art (later the International bibliography of art) was established in 1990. Throughout the next two decades, art libraries in each of the five countries selected key material whose records were then submitted for publication. This collaboration came to an end in 2009 when the Getty announced that it could no longer continue to support the IBA on its own, although it would introduce free access via its website to the data for the years 1975 to 2007.

Following the FAB Supplemental Meetings held 21-23 June 2010 at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), there was general agreement that two prototype applications should be built to provide new ideas and technical approaches to compare/contrast to the artlibraries.net model. Jim Michalko, Vice President of OCLC Research, agreed that OCLC would build a prototype modeling a group catalog of art history libraries within the OCLC membership, while the GRI committed to building one on a Solr/Lucene platform that combined heterogeneous data sources from some of the FAB members. The resulting prototypes were publicly demonstrated at the artlibraries.net Users Group Meeting in Lisbon in October 2010. Other articles in this issue detail the deficiencies of the current bibliographic model and the information needs of the 21st-century art history scholar. The prototype development was based upon and informed by these issues, and sought to define possible technical solutions to overcome some of these inadequacies. The prototypes must also extend the paradigm of bibliography being contained within an abstracting and indexing construct, and move towards a concept of ‘complete bibliography’.

The Burlington Magazine, with its juxtaposition of art trade and academia, historicism and aestheticism, has occupied a unique role in the international art historical panorama since it was first published in 1903. From its very beginnings the magazine had produced a detailed printed index, which reflected the diversity of its contents. In 2005 the magazine received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to produce a cumulative online index from 1903 to the present. The Burlington Index is now online, nearly complete and free for all to use. Why did the Burlington need an index when it was already included in JSTOR? How is the Burlington Index structured and what is it based on? What are its aims and limitations? The Burlington Index wants to be a vessel to navigate the ocean of free-text available on JSTOR; a tool for research to open up the contents of the Burlington to a new generation of readers and, ultimately, a magnifying glass to reveal the magazine as a primary source for research on the history of art history, the art market and the art press.