In his 1956 film, Tout la mémoire du monde (All the memory of the world), French director Alain Resnais turned the black and white documentary footage of an automated retrieval system at the Bibliothèque Nationale into an ominously noire work. The film depicts an enormous open space criss-crossed with a matrix of metal rails. A robotic unit moves through it with eerie precision, its mechanism stopping to pull a book in crude imitation of a human motion. The tone has more in common with that of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) than with any cheerful ‘Let's go to the library’ educational pitch. After all, this is a library into which no one can go. A fully machinic world, its combination of nineteenth-century technology and twentieth-century managerial aspirations eliminates human presence as part of its pre-steam-punk dystopianism.

What challenges does metadata managers face when embarking on a Linked Data transformation? How can legacy projects be better understood to ensure such data remodels stay true to their original content? Current efforts made by the Getty Provenance Index elucidate how this task can be much more than simple data re-structuring, and how much manual and specialized labor goes into updating a 35 year old database.

Works of book art can express archival and documentary values. Book artists whose work is informed by archival and documentary evidence contribute to the wider dissemination of original sources. In supporting this function, their generative practices can be viewed as curatorial and editorial functions. How does archivally informed book art represent and communicate evidence? How can these sources operate as documentary sources? This essay offers a discussion of these questions.

The Cabell Screen, a 400 square foot media display installed on the façade of James Branch Cabell Library is a recent venue for artistic and scholarly expression at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. Spanning two floors of the main academic library building, the Cabell Screen displays curated electronic exhibitions of still and moving images to thousands of people who walk by the building each day. With no additional budget or staffing, a committee of librarians developed a mission statement, content strategy, and workflows to program and promote content. While the Cabell Screen uses a specific type of technology, the practices established at VCU Libraries can be applied to a range of budgets and media, including projections and monitors, to create a dedicated electronic exhibition space.

How are sketchbooks collected, organized, indexed and made accessible in the UK's memory institutions? My research is outlined, describing how, through interviews and a questionnaire sent to sketchbook-holding institutions, they are acquired, who they are accessed by, problems faced by those accessing them, the extent to which sketchbooks can be handled and examined physically, and the benefits and consequences of digitization and online access of sketchbooks. Finally, institutions offer ideas on how access to sketchbooks can be improved.

It has art and libraries, but it is not a traditional art library. The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) holds extensive imagery and art collections from across two hundred years, a range of locations and breadth of subject matter by professional and talented amateur artists. As a young museum we are discovering the shared heritage and scope of our collections, and the challenges of combining and exhibiting them from six constituent museums.