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Report from Germany
Working Group of Art and Museum
Libraries in Germany - Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kunst- und
Museumsbibliotheken (AKMB)
Since the beginning of the 1990ies
the AKMB combines the interests of institutions and persons
concerned with librarian work in the arts and humanities:
- Coordination and cooperation to
improve the efficiency in major library tasks as acquisition,
cataloguing and user services in art and museum libraries
- Development of and information
on new working techniques
- Formulation and representation
of interests
- Support of the professional
development of librarians by offering courses, seminars and
conferences
- Promotion, establishment and
maintenance of relations to educational institutions for
librarians, documentalists and archivists
- Exchange of experiences,
information and communication
- Consultation and advice for
library and documentary tasks
- Cooperation with related
associations and institutions, i.e. museums, archives,
information and documentation services
- Development and maintenance of
international contacts
The AKMB was founded in Februrary 1995
at Berlin. The first meeting of its members took place in the annual
conference of librarians at Goettingen. Altogether the AKMB had 137
corporative and 72 personal members (1997/12/31).
The AKMB organizes annual meetings
of her members to support the professional development by lectures
and to enable an exchange between the members. The themes of the
lectures reflect the activities of the AKMB:
- in 1996 in the context of the
Annual Librarian Conference, held at Erlangen, alphabetical
cataloguing, acqusisition in art and museum libraries, the use
of the German Authority File for Subjects, i.e. Deutsche
Schlagwortnormdatei (SWD), have been subjects.
- In 1997 the meeting was
organized in the context of the Conference of the Working Group
of Special Libraries, i.e. Arbeitsgemeinschaft der
Spezialbibliotheken (ASpB) at Berlin. The focal point of this
conference was subject indexing - the benefits of using German
standards, developped mainly by university libraries. The
problems of applying subject terms in specialised collections
and ways towards an cooperation.to improve the quality of the
exsting subject authority file were also addressed
Since 1995 specialised groups have
been founded to discuss topics of the day-to-day librarianship and
to define objects for the further work of the AKMB. The following
groups do exist: Data Processing, Acquisition, Cataloguing, Museum
Libraries, One Person Libraries, Subject Indexing. Courses and
workshops enable the participants to discuss and solve practical
problems, for example developping and / or creating new
classifications for shelving and presenting the collection,
preservation methods and conditions, ALLEGRO-C software user
meeting. Between 40 and 70 persons participated in each course or
workshop.
Another result of the work during
the first years is the edition of the "AKMB-news", which
has been positive admitted by the colleagues. The news are published
three times a year and reflect the activities of the AKMB by
publishing relevant articles. The editing team acquires the articles
for the issues as well as advertisements to raise funds for the
publication and over and above that it manages together with the
treasurer the subscriptions.
In 1998 the AKMB plans the
following activities:
- Workshop on the preservation of
printed materials in art and museum libraries at the
Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbuettel
- the meeting of members and
annual conference within the German Librarian Congress at
Francfort / M.
- the reinforcement of
international contacts
- an workshop on subject indexing
at the Art Library at Berlin together with the annual meeting of
the Documentation Working Group within the German Council of
Museums in October
- the annual meeting at
Wolfenbuettel 'Data processing in art and museum libraries',
- courses concerning the use of
the German Subject Authority File.
Für das Internet
bearbeitete Fassung des Textes. Autorin: Margret Schild - abgedruckt
in: In: IFLA / Section of Art Libraries: Newsletter. - Houston,
Amsterdam No. 42- 1998, No. 1, S. 6 - 7
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