When a group of women artists decided to organise their slides to inspire others to document themselves and raise the visibility of women’s art, they could not have known that several decades later those slides would still be together, forming the core of an internationally significant research resource. How did this idea of gathering together images transform a women’s art group – in the 1980s these were almost as common as book groups are today – into the Women’s Art Library/Make collection? Historically rooted in gender politics and the subsequent emergence of a radicalised women’s art practice and feminist art criticism, WAL/Make is an exciting ‘work in progress’. Now based in Goldsmiths, University of London it is being developed as a key special collection by the Library.

The Margery Somers Foster Center, based at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library on the Douglass College campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, is a resource center and digital archive focused on women, scholarship and leadership. Numerous intersecting initiatives based at the center, library and university are making visible the lives, works and contributions to cultural history of contemporary women artists active in the United States.

The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University is home to the most extensive collection of women’s history in the UK. It houses a wide variety of material from badges to banners, which reveal the many ways in which the struggle to change womens’ lives has been expressed visually. A move to purpose-built premises has created opportunities to open up the collections to a widening new audience.

A woman artist of wide-ranging interests, Beatrix Potter is less well-known for her activities in sheep farming, natural science and the preservation of the Lakeland countryside than for her much-loved children’s books, especially The tale of Peter Rabbit. But Potter scholars and enthusiasts can gain a broad view of her oeuvre at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, home to the internationally-acclaimed original collection of Leslie Linder, the first curator and collector of her work. The world-wide popularity of the material gives rise to some challenging conservation issues that the V&A, in close association with Frederick Warne, is working to resolve.

I’ve called this paper ‘The New Bauhaus: an art education for the 21st century’ – and it involves an element of prediction, which is always high risk in the unpredictable worlds of art and design. Let me start, as a cautionary tale and as a curtain-raiser, with the example of a designer who thought he was rather good at looking ahead.

arthistoricum.net is a new web portal launched by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich and Heidelberg University Library, in cooperation with the Institute for Art History at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. Other partners include the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden, and the project is part of the DFG funding programme for virtual subject libraries. The departure point for the portal is the bibliographic tracing and subject indexing of the digital achievements of international art history (websites and online publications). Building upon this core task, the portal’s fundamental purpose is to increase use of these resources and to develop digital working methods.