The Rijksmuseum project in Amsterdam began in 1999 with a government plan to celebrate the millennium in the Netherlands with a series of grand cultural projects. It was recognized that the museum building had been neglected, and urgently needed modernizing. Following a European search, the Spanish architects of Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos won the competition in 2001. The renovation would also focus on new spaces for the entrance hall and a pavilion for Asian art. The main art gallery and the library were selected as places to receive an especially thorough renovation and restauration. The Cuypers Library Hall is the one of the very few 19th-century library spaces that have survived in the Netherlands. The library is very close to the architect's original conception of the space and how it would be used. The reception is an impressive 20-meter high rectangular book hall, elaborately decorated and composed as a Gesamtkunstwerk. This article will draw attention to the design and the historic functions of the library hall.

The renovation project of the Forney Decorative and Applied Arts Library in Paris, belonging to the Paris Specialized Libraries' Network, not only concerns the modernization, restructuring and security of the building, an historical monument, but also the library usage, with an ambitious cultural project underpinning the rooms' refurbishment aimed at providing greater public access to the library, the building, and the spectacular visual collections. New visitors, alongside established readers, are welcomed in the heart of the tourist centre of Paris.

In the libraries of the Yale Center for British Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, Louis I. Kahn created spaces and atmospheres that are particularly conducive to reading about and viewing art. In these rooms, natural light combines with sympathetic materials and forms a timeless dance with thought and contemplation. This paper focusses on the unique library carrels which form the physical bridge between light and dark, inside and outside, and constitute a microcosm of Kahn's thoughts about reading, libraries and museums.

The National Gallery of Ireland is the country's premier art institution. It houses the nation's collection of fine art in addition to a collection of library and archive material relating to the visual arts. The library and archive collections play an invaluable role supporting the work of the gallery and are regularly consulted by external researchers. Surprisingly, for more than a century there was no dedicated library space allocated to this collection. This article explores the development of the collection and the space it has occupied within the Gallery over the last 150 years, chronicling the challenges the gallery has faced housing this growing collection. This article outlines the situation today and concludes with an outline of the gallery's future plans for the library and archive in its efforts to create a space that will be a fitting home for this remarkable collection.

In 2021 the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Research Library will move from its historical setting into a new building as part of a new House of Text. This House of Text is faced with the challenge of adapting a former early 20th-century apartment house (never before used as a museum or a library) to the needs of an institution that collects and conserves books on fine art and makes them accessible to the public in multiple ways.

The 1976 earthquake that devastated much of the Friuli region of Italy also marked the rebirth of the Villa Manin as a centre for cataloguing and restoration. This essay charts how this Venetian villa transformed into an important centre for restoring and conserving the cultural heritage of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.

The Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design is a successful reinvention of the art library through the adaptive re-use of an historic bank building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to reviewing how the library's goals were met during its first decade, the most significant change, the transformation of the slide library into a material resource centre and the growth of a community of such collections and related initiatives, will be described.

During 2016, after overcoming many obstacles, the library of the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (National Institute of Art History - INHA), Jacques-Doucet collection, was established in an exceptional space designed during the Second Empire by the French architect Henri Labrouste (1801–1875). The reopening of this reading room is the fruit of a large-scale renovation project involving several French institutions. It is also the culmination of a long-standing plan to create an illustrious library of art history for France.

The Prado-Recoletos axis is the main historical boulevard in Madrid, which contains the most important concentration of art museums in all of Spain: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. In the last years, they have undergone extensive renovation. The different renovation projects can be used to examine how museum libraries today juggle the needs of their users while addressing the challenge of providing the services of a modern research library. The new State Museum Libraries Network (BIMUS) has been an important factor in this development.