Library of Art, Music and Entertainment of the Department of Humanities

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The Library of Art, Music and Entertainment - Department of Humanistic Studies is the new name, starting from January 2012, of the Library of the Department of Artistic, Musical and Entertainment Disciplines, a department deactivated at the end of 2011. The Library was born with the birth of the Department itself, in 1985. In it the respective bibliographic assets of the various libraries and former Institutes, in particular the Institute of Art, were merged of the Faculty of Letters, undoubtedly the oldest.

The collections of the Institute of Art History were inaugurated in 1907 by Pietro Toesca, who in that year was called to the chair of Art History. The library acquired documents for teaching and research from time to time, including equipment and photographic reproductions, which formed the core of the photo library, and collected over time bequests from teachers, including between the 1970s and early 1980s part of the books by Lionello Venturi and the fund donated by Aldo's heirs Bertini. The Institute of History of Music was founded within the Institute of History of Art, directed by Massimo Mila: also the bibliographic collections of this institute, as well as the bibliographic fund of the musical critic and organizer Guido M. Gatti, later merged into the Library of the Department.

The other former institutes from which the Department Library collected funds were the Institute of the History of Medieval and Modern Art of the Faculty of Teaching, the Institute of History of the Theater and the Institute of History of Cinema and Entertainment of the Faculty of Teaching.

The opportunity to pool the funds offered the reason for a systematization, in particular of the collocations. The subsequent entry into SBN allowed an early start of automation on various levels, such as administrative-management activity, cataloging and subjecting.

In 1995 the Library completed the move to the premises on the second floor of the Palazzo delle Facoltà Umanistici (Palazzo Nuovo), where it is still located today: this moment coincided with the reorganization of services to the public, in particular reference, external loan, interlibrary loan and document delivery.

Starting from the second half of the 1980s, a large quantity of audiovisual material entered the library's assets: initially VHS, but later also compact discs, which were added to the large number of LP records, to the point that it became necessary to allocate some Department personnel to its management. Thus the Audiovisual Laboratory was born, independent, from an administrative point of view, from the library office: DVDs were added to the materials offered by this 'repository', while production functions of audio-video material were also added. Since 2014 this structure has been reorganized as a Media Library.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the Library specialized in offering its services to teachers and research staff, but at the same time also acting as a support for teaching and degree courses.

The Library belongs to Department of Humanistic Studies