The IAU Commission B Working Group exists to foster communication and understanding between research astronomers and the librarians and other information professionals who support them. Librarians have long been an essential resource to astronomers, helping to track down hard-to-find resources, maintaining access to bibliographic databases, and managing the complex finances associated with journal and book collections. The roles of the library and librarian are changing as information becomes increasingly digital in format and increasingly available on the Internet, but the librarian is no less essential than before. We aim to foster a strong partnership between astronomers and librarians so that together common goals can be attained.

The WG on Libraries was officially recognized for the first time in the Transactions of the IAU XXI A (Reports on Astronomy 1990), but librarians were involved in Commission 5 activities before that (largely due to the efforts of George A. Wilkins, President of the Commission from 1982-1988) (see Transactions of the IAU XX A, Reports on Astronomy 1987). Wayne Warren (Goddard Space Flight Center, USA) and Helen Knudsen (Califormia Institute of Technology) were the group's first chairpersons, Brenda Corbin (U.S. Naval Observatory) became Helen Knudsen's successor in 1990. From 1996 to November 2008, Fionn Murtagh (School of Computer Science, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland) and Uta Grothkopf (European Southern Observatory, Germany) have been co-chairs. From December 2008 through August 2015, Bob Hanisch (STScI, Baltimore, MD) and Marsha Bishop (NRAO, Charlottesville, VA) served as co-chairs of the working group. In August 2015 Jill Lagerstrom (STScI) and Donna Thompson (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory) were appointed co-chairs.

Some projects of interest to both librarians and astronomers (though not developed under the auspices of this group) are:

• the International Astronomy Meetings List
• a database listings of IAU colloquia
• the Directory of Astronomy Librarians and Libraries
• digitization projects of historical documents
• maintenance of core lists of astronomy books and astronomy and physics journals
• mailing lists Astrolib and EGAL (European Group of Astronomy Librarians, now defunct)
• The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

• The IAU Thesaurus, compiled by R.M. and R.R. Shobbrook under the auspices of the IAU, may prove to be of use as a tool for automated information retrieval, provided that necessary updates can be implemented.
• The IAU funded the first LISA (Library and Information Services in Astronomy) conference, held in 1988 in Washington, DC (IAU Colloquium 110) and supported the second (IAU Technical Workshop, Garching, Germany, 1995). Since then, "LISA" has developed into a series of conferences which are held at regular intervals.


• The Working Group on Libraries held a meeting during the IAU General Assembly since 2009.
• The Working Group, together with the community of curators of telescope bibliographies, has developed a document on Best Practices for Creating a Telescope Bibliography.