Quel avenir pour les bibliothèques d’arts décoratifs ?

Public libraries in museums stand at a cross road, both figuratively and literally. Within a museum most of the flow of regular readers comes from the museum staff and art historians, while the general visitor looks on, uncertain whether they are welcome. Changing displays around the threshold, in the lobby and on landings, share the treasures and so tempt museum visitors to enrol as readers, but it can be a shy courtship on both sides. In the digital age, that sense of a museum’s library as a closed club room is less intimidating as potential readers may have visited already, on line in the museum’s web site. But even there the sense of two institutions under one roof may continue, with two databases, one for the museum collections and one for the library, one fed by curators, the other by librarians. For museum directors reaching out to the widest public, running an art library as well is not the most obvious priority.