Research library specialized in the history of science and technology, the Library of the Museo Galileo aims to support historical studies on the various scientific disciplines, on technology and medicine from the ancient world up to the first half of the twentieth century.
In addition to the book collection the library also houses a rich archive, prints and drawings, photographs.
All of the library's material can be searched on the on-line catalogue. In the case of some miscellaneous volumes and journals, the single articles and essays have been individually catalogued. The arrangement and description of the archival material and the photographic collection are still in progress. Plenty of documents are available in digital format: the most of them are freely accessible in internet, some others have internal access only.
Among the highlighted activities of the library are the compiling of bibliographies and the cataloguing of documents related to the history of science, even those not part of the library's collection. In order to allow the integrated consultation of all the Institute collections, the collective database of the library also hosts the catalogue of the Museum's scientific instruments, the medal catalogue and the current digital photo archive which is still being uploaded.
The library partecipates in networks and inter-library projects. All data are available in WorldCat, while incunabula, 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century books are also searchable in SBN-National library service, in the library catalogue of the University of Florence and in the one of the Tuscan universities (SBART). The ancient periodicals (till 1800) and the current ones are included in the ACNP-Italian catalogue of periodicals. Moreoever all data have been published as Linked Open Data in Datahub (Open Knowledge Foundation) and in OpenData (Regione Toscana).