p/a Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie,
Postbus 90418, 2509 LK - DEN HAAG - Nederland
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Website van OKBN * ARLIS/NL p/a Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, Postbus 90418, 2509 LK - DEN HAAG - Nederland |
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The Overleg Kunsthistorische Bibliotheken Nederland * Art Libraries Society / The Netherlands (OKBN * ARLIS/NL) is a consortium bringing together librarians and subject-specialists of those libraries in the Netherlands that hold specialized collections on the visual arts and the history of art and architecture. It has its origins in 1982, when eight librarians specialized in this field first organized some informal meetings to exchange experience, opinions and ideas. Since then the librarians of between thirty and forty institutions have regularly met, each in turn acting as host for the meetings that always remained as informal as in the early days of the consortium.
It was only in 1995 that it was decided, for practical reasons, to transform this informal consortium into an official, registered association, which came into being in February 1996. Its members are the parti cipating institutions -with one vote each- and individual librarians and documentalists interested in the field who participate in the meetings, but cannot vote. It is governed by the general assembly and directed by a board consisting of five members elected from the assembly.
The characters of the participating institutions diverge widely. They include purely academic and research libraries, museum libraries of various sizes and specialization, the libraries of some academies of art and schools of architecture and design, and those of some other institutions that have for various reasons built up a specialized collection in the field. The meetings engage the many interests that the individual participants, notwithstanding their diverging institutional background, have in common.
One of our main concerns is that - with dwindling resources and mounting bookprices - our country as a whole should yet dispose of adequate documentation on the history of the visual arts in all its aspects, and that this should be rendered easily accessible to both scholars and the general public and administered as efficiently as possible. Coordination of the acquisitions is therefore a recurrent topic in the meetings: fixed items on the agenda are the announcements of new subscriptions to periodicals and series, and the acquisitions of expensive books and media (microfiches, CD-ROMs).
An equally essential topic has been the mapping of the infrastructure of art-historical documentation in our country. The principal effort in this field was a survey of the scope of existing collections in the Netherlands, complemented by inventories of archival materials, bibliographies, microfiches and -films, auction catalogues, periodicals, and CD-ROMs in the participating institutions, and surveys of local systems of subject retrieval and shelving, methods of description of exhibition catalogues, and methods of user-instruction and the processing of inter-library loans. The new possibilities offered -and problems posed- by the new electronic media and the InterNet will require close attention.
OKBN seeks to cooperate with national library institutions and organisations, in particular the UKB (corporate body of Royal Library and the university libraries) and the Dutch union catalogue (NCC), implemented jointly by the Royal Library and by PICA (Centre for library automatization). OKBN contributed to the BC (Basisclassificatie), the general subject classification developed by the UKB. As a result of an OKBN initiative it has become possible to submit to the NCC/P (Dutch union catalogue of periodicals) the periodical holdings also of those member libraries that do not participate fully in NCC.
Many of the OKBN libraries cannot afford, or do not choose, to participate in NCC. The meetings of OKBN have been useful in preparing an alternative that, while offering fewer facilities, is yet cheaper and more adapted to the specific needs of art-libraries. In 1989 the Rijksmuseum started automating its catalogue with the British library information system TINlib, translated and adapted for use in Dutch art libraries. This system has been adopted and developed in mutual exchange by several other art libraries, including the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie RKD and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen. OKBN is engaged in a continuing effort to realize an integrated database providing immediate access to all arthistorical literature in Dutch libraries, desirable because it will greatly facilitate consultation and will make shared cataloguing possible.
Apart from the items related to the coordination of collecting various other themes are discussed, either relating to developments in professional librarianship or taken from some specific field in the history of art. Such themes are often introduced by expert guest-speakers invited for the occasion. The host organisation generally provides an afternoon programme: a tour of the institution, a presentation of some special feature, or the visit to a current exhibition. Subgroups with common interests can meet for special sessions: these include a group of TINlib users and a group of librarians of institutions specialized in modern and contemporary art.
OKBN maintains international relations since its infancy: at the first European conference of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries in Geneva in 1984 it was decided to organize the next conference in Holland. OKBN duly organized the conference, dedicated to art periodicals, and published its proceedings. In connection with this conference OKBN was invited by Arts Libraries Journal to provide copy for a special issue on Dutch art libraries, which appeared in spring 1987. A Dutch art librarian, Maggy Wishaupt, was a member (1987-1995) and, from 1989-1993, Chair of the standing committee of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries. Currently the Dutch art librarians are represented in the committee by Geert-Jan Koot, librarian of the Rijksmuseum. In 1998 OKBN will again host the congress of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries. Finally OKBN took the initiative for a symposium bringing together, in October 1994 at The Hague, art librarians from the Netherlands and from (Flemish-speaking) Belgium, with whom we share - apart from professional interests- our language, an important part of our history and, not least, an interest in Netherlandish art.
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