The year the Olympic Games were forced to halt international sportsmanship to include a horrifying entre’act of international bloodshed. A year of political schizophrenia in the United States, in which the largest popular vote ever was accorded to the man who was to be at the epicenter of the most profound national scandal in U.S. history. The sort of year which makes newspaper editors happy, and fills the rest of us with morbid fascination. It is not surprising, therefore, that the founding of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) is not the event that most people associate with the year 1972. And yet, the organisation grew and was shaped in the intervening decade by circumstances not only within the relatively narrow spectrum of professional art librarianship and visual curatorship, but within the larger contexts of sociological and technological circumstances, and within the art and library worlds of which it is a part.

Some key developments over the last ten years in the cataloging of art library materials are surveyed. They are grouped into short essays, wherein the author looks for their broader implications. Details are omitted, but extensive footnotes will aid the reader who wants to track them down. The citations emphasise particularly ARLIS/NA’s role in the decade’s activities.

At first, microforms and the Fine Arts did not appear to be very compatible. Today with improvements of microform readers and technology together with the proliferation of types of materials which are published in microform, their acceptance is assured. Journals, series of out-of-print books, exhibition catalogues, photographs and other archival collections are now appearing in ever increasing numbers and are being accepted by those interested in both the acquisitions and research in Fine Arts. Librarians must constantly demand acceptable quality, complete bibliographic control and also begin to plan for regional and international co-operation so that those libraries unable to purchase the expensive sets may share in the increasing wealth of information and not be left without some form of access.

During the past ten years the field of visual resources curatorship has become increasingly professional. Hand in hand with this advancement has come a push to introduce standards for organising and accessing visual materials. Computerisation has occurred in individual image collections, yet the wider use of automated systems within visual resources collections awaits the establishment of such standards. These concerns for professionalism, standardisation, automation and the adoption of new photographic media have been prime factors in the development of visual resources curatorship since 1972.

The first art librarianship curricula were determined by the bibliographic requirements of scholarly libraries, until, the membership of ARLIS/NA revealed, in the 1970s, that programs with wider scope were needed. Today MSLS curricula for art librarians include core courses on general library topics; background courses in the humanities, archives and special collections, indexing and abstracting, and preservation; subject courses in art bibliography and visual resources; fieldwork and internships; and recommendations for institutional cognate courses in art history and museology. Qualifications emphasise subject specialisation of faculty and strong local art resources. Here curriculum objectives are enumerated, and the importance of co-ordination with related professional programs is stressed.