Online library

The Online Library gives you access to a vast array of resources on museums and museology

The result of the work of several generations of librarians since 1948, though long reserved for their use alone, the Library database is now directly accessible to everyone, in its entirety, in ICOM’s three official languages.

It contains, first and foremost, all publications by ICOM and its network of international committees, national committees, regional alliances and associated organisations since their inception, as well as a vast number of references to books, journals, articles, guides and handbooks, directories, conference proceedings, studies and reports, drawn from a variety of academic, institutional and non-profit sources in fields of interest to ICOM, such as the protection of endangered heritage, the fight against illicit trafficking in cultural property, the social role of museums, education and professional ethics. Where documents are freely available, links to the digital versions are provided in the records.

Library database

The language of the portal is the one you have chosen for your browser if you are English, French or Spanish speaking, and English by default for the others. You will not find a button to navigate from one language to another, but it is possible to change this criterion through the browser settings. Two types of search are possible:

• Free search: each page of the portal has a line at the top that allows you to search all the fields of the database at once with your own words. If the search is for several words at the same time, the records containing all the words requested will be returned (Boolean operator AND).
• Advanced search: more precise, it offers a wide choice of criteria that can be crossed: titles, authors, keywords, year of publication, type and nature of document, language of the text or summary…

Several tools are available to optimise the search and preserve the results

Lexicons: each field in the advanced search has an icon to access the corresponding lexicon. If you choose to enter a word directly, in a free search or without using the lexicon proposed in the lines of the advanced search fields, it is possible to use the truncation * at the beginning and/or end of this word to widen the search. For example: in the title field, the word “concept” gives 53 results. The word concept* gives 137 results, because it includes concepts, conception, conceptor…

Basket: Each record can be saved in a basket to create a selective bibliography from the results obtained.

Sorting: The list of results can be sorted by

• date of entry of the record in the database (from the most recent to the oldest)
• date of publication of the document (from the most recent to the oldest)
• collective author (organisation, institution or museum author of the text)
• type of document (book or monograph, book chapter, periodical, periodical article, document, website)

Filtering: To refine the results of a search, filtering – reversible – can be applied to reduce the list, according to 5 criteria

• keyword
• country or geographical area
• type of document
• by location of the document: source document available for consultation at ICOM, digital version available online, held at the Centre Dominique-Vivant Denon (CDVD)

∆ Warning: In cases where a search with a slightly too broad scope produces a number of results greater than 1000 references, the page will display “1000 results for your selection” regardless of the actual number of records meeting the search criteria. A more precise search, by crossing at least 2 criteria for example, is then recommended.

Contact the librarian

A short history of the ICOM Online Library