The Kunstbibliothek is a much larger institution as may first appear, boasting not only a multidisciplinary library, but also several comprehensive museum collections of its own that contain more than one million items in all. The holdings on the decorative arts span the entire spectrum of the history of art, ranging in date from the late Middle Ages up to the present day and including:
The Kunstbibliothek allows researchers from home and abroad to study the objects in the various museum collections in connection with scholarly primary and secondary sources from the libraries.