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’.