The new hybrid art library: printed materials and virtual information

Purpose ‐ The aim of this paper is to provide a discussion of whether librarians need to use special cataloguing for virtual resources to use and preserve this kind of information. Design/methodology/approach ‐ The paper uses information obtained from a literature search along with examples from museum libraries. Findings ‐ The paper finds that the library's chief mechanism for bibliographic control is our own catalogue, so we must continue to use our traditional cataloguing and the indexing tools according to the international rules as we have done when we catalogued special materials such as auction and exhibition catalogues. Originality/value ‐ This paper argues that we must incorporate virtual information into our libraries in the same way we have incorporated other formats in order to build a hybrid library.