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In the last few years, artists' archives have gained a central role in the debate on the nature, treatment and valorization of 20th century and contemporary archives. They are fascinating and precious aggregations, characterized by a plurality of documentary typologies and by specific requirements for their description. Starting from the definition of personal archives, the paper proposes a definition of artists' archives and then attempts to indicate their main characteristics, contents and elements of complexity. Finally, the paper attempts to establish a dialogue between archivists and artists, collectors, gallery owners, critics and curators in order to find common elements and differences in their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nowadays world characterized by complexity, the digital systems for archival and bibliographic description are, especially in Italy, a faithful mirror of too many horizontal (among bodies with national functions) and vertical (among central and peripheral levels) complications. The integration of data sets conceived according to the up-to-date conceptual domain models would simplify the dynamics of representation, improve user experiences, and optimize the environmental costs of computing infrastructures. The concepts to be shared should relate to agents (individual or collective), places, and chronological data, deepening on how to address the more complex issues opened by things. This paper introduces three possible scenarios of semantic cooperation between archivists and librarians, not necessarily alternative: activating a conceptual matching through common entities, relying on a neutral semantic data infrastructure such as Wikidata, or, finally, developing a transversal core ontology. Hoping that disciplinary boundaries will not impede cooperation, two types of impediments must be considered: the organizational one (bottom-up, top-down, or a virtuous synergy between the two organizational models?) and the crucial issue of offering easy-to-use interfaces to end users, not only constituted by software agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]