The Photo Library

With the removal of the Photo Library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz to the piano nobile of the Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, the almost 600,000 photographs in the collection (state as of June 2010) have found a new home. The transfer, however, has led to no alteration in the photo library’s system, nor in access to it; the corpus of photos remains, as before, freely available for the consultation of scholars on an open-shelf plan. The Salone Rosso and Salone Verde accommodate the sections on Sculpture and Painting, the latter ranging from the Romanesque to the Renaissance. The smaller sections on the Applied Arts, Foreign Painting and Twentieth Century Painting can also be found in these rooms. The sections on Baroque Painting and Nineteenth Century Painting can be consulted instead in the Sala della Musica, while the sections on Architecture and Urbanism are housed in the Sala di Lettura. Apart from traditional research using the analogical corpus of photos, OPAC-PCs on all work stations and consultation desks permit access to the Internet and to the various digital projects of the Photo Library. A separate room has been installed on the ground floor for the special collections of the Photo Library. Here the large-format photographs, prints and rariora (historical holdings) can be conserved and also consulted in optimal conditions. A small reference library (in the process of being built up) on the history and theory of photography can also be found in this room; its basic materials form part of library shelf mark ‘Y’. The Photo Library is thus developing not only into a state-of-the-art archive for the consultation of photos, but also into a centre for scientific research on image-generating technologies.