Architecture.com, the official Web site for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), serves as the base for many facets of RIBA’s Web‐based activities. RIBA has been in existence since 1837 and currently has 30,000 members and a staff of 150. Their mission is “to advance architecture by demonstrating benefit to society and promoting excellence in the profession.” The site also contains a vision statement and strategy as well as the organization’s constitution.
The RIBA Gallery promotes architecture through exhibits, lectures, debates and outreach; through their efforts, RIBA tries to make architecture available to the public. For example, the Web site contains a listing for the Summer 2002 programme, which describes talks such as “Memory, Legacy and Public Buildings” and a week of talks on “The Way We Live.”
There are two large functional segments to the Web site: the Library catalogue and the links section. The catalog is an index to 300 journals, 135,000 books, and over a million drawings, manuscripts, and portraits. All are fully searchable by keyword, author, title or subject. Researchers can even use the catalog to search for photographs. The entries for articles include citation information as well as abstracts and subject headings.
The online catalog, however, contains references to only a portion of what the library holds. The actual library holds 135,000 books, 20,000 pamphlets, reports, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues. It has been indexed since the early 1980s, and RIBA’s staff are currently retro‐cataloging older materials. Users are invited to contact the library if any assistance is needed, and RIBA also offers a photocopying service for print items. The collection as a whole focuses on British works and architects but is branching out into other areas. There are three major collections: the Early Imprints Collection, with 4,000 books published up to 1840; the Handley‐Read Collection, originally a working library for its namesake, which focuses on Victorian and Edwardian architecture; and the Modern Movement Collection, which includes 600 books about the development of architecture in the 1920s and 1930s.
The links segment of the Web site is composed of two lists, RIBA Links and RIBA Architecture Links. In the first list, RIBA has over 1,000 Web sites (primarily British) listed, along with abstracts. RIBA Links can be searched by keyword, essentially creating an architecture search engine. RIBA Architecture Links, more global in scope, has 2,000 sites listed and is compiled by the library staff. The organization welcomes suggestions for additional online resources.
The RIBA Web site is valuable to anyone interested in architecture. Its usefulness will continue to increase with the addition of pre‐1980 materials from the collection as well as with their expansion into global architectural issues. I recommend this resource for all researchers and students.
