The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), consisting of The Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), houses significant collections of material on Latin American art that document the cultural history of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America, as well as the foundation of New York City as an epicenter of US Latino and Latin American cultural production since the 19th century. Ranging from historic archeological photographs to contemporary artists’ books, the holdings of the NYARC libraries are varied in their scope and record the contributions of Latin American and Latino artists to the international art scene. With the creation of Arcade, the shared online catalog of the Frick, MoMA and Brooklyn Museum, the ‘collective collection’ of material about and from Latin America has been strengthened in ways both expected and unanticipated. Techniques for integrating Latin American bibliographic information into discovery platforms, strategies for increasing the visibility of these collections, and ideas for providing improved access to the Latin American subset of the NYARC collections are being explored, and many further opportunities exist to engage in co-operative collection development in this area, across the NYARC consortium and with other peer institutions.

The Study Centre at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona has, since its inception in 2007, amassed a wealth of material relating to Latin American art. Its collecting policy addresses the relationship of contemporary works of art to their documentation and aims to compensate for the lack of a tradition of public collecting of documentary and bibliographic material relating to 20th-century contemporary art practices. The collection now includes influential artist publications such as concrete poetry, magazines, mail art, books of photography and even fiction written by artists, as well as special materials from letters to photographic negatives, alongside information from galleries, cultural spaces and artistic centres.

From its creation in 1968 the Gulbenkian Art Library has possessed a number of special collections, and these have been enriched through major bequests or through acquisition. Currently there are about 180 collections with relevance for the study of Portuguese art and culture: they include private libraries, the private archives of Portuguese artists and architects, and photographic archives. Material in the special collections is available through the library’s catalogue and some have already been digitised and are available on the internet, depending on their copyright terms and conditions. Among these special collections two have special relevance to the study of the history of Brazilian art and architecture: the collection of Portuguese tiles and the Robert Smith Collection.

Free and unrestricted access to online educational or scholarly material, without subscription or registration requirements, seeks to eliminate traditional financial, legal and technical barriers. Indeed it provides greater accessibility to scholarly materials, substantially increasing the visibility of research. This article introduces the Mexican open access journals that specialize in art and culture, and analyzes their visibility in the databases of Latin American scholarly journals.

The existence of the Franz Mayer Museum is due to the German philanthropist and naturalized Mexican, Franz Gabriel Mayer Traumann Altschul (1882-1975), who bequeathed to the Mexican people his library and decorative arts collection. Considered the most important of its kind in the country, it includes works from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from America, Europe and Asia. It is located in Mexico City, in a building dating from the second half of the 16th century, and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011. The Library, which is open to researchers, is currently made up of around 22,000 volumes, and specializes in decorative arts and the history of Mexico in the 19th century, among other subjects. As well as displaying the Mayer Collection the Museum also presents temporary exhibitions on decorative arts, contemporary design and photography, while the library holds two exhibitions a year highlighting the bibliographic collections.

The São Paulo Museum of Art is one of the most important art museums in Brazil. This paper presents the experience of its Library in structuring and making two databases available on the internet – the online catalogue and the controlled vocabulary of arts and authorities catalogue – and the results of a first analysis of the transaction log files of these databases.

Librarians at Columbia’s Avery Library, New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and the Research Division of the New York Public Library are working together to offer a two-day symposium directed towards bibliographic resources for the study of Latin American art in New York City. The symposium, Latin American art bibliography: a continuing conversation, will celebrate the collections of these three institutions, placing them within the context of the field and the larger bibliographic and library landscapes. Supported in part by the Humanities Initiative at NYU and the Institute on the Study of Latin American Art the symposium will feature papers and talks, as well as tours of local landmarks.