Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books, is at the forefront of exploring born-digital material in the North East of England. The Centre has met many challenges on its quest to acquire, preserve and provide access to born-digital material. This article describes these challenges and how Seven Stories has approached them, and how the Centre is using born-digital material at present.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the UK’s emerging national collection of early computer-generated art and design. Many of the earliest works only survive on paper, but the V&A also holds some born-digital material. The Museum is currently involved in a project to digitise the computer art collections and to make the information available online. Artworks, books and ephemera from the Patric Prince Collection and the archives of the Computer Arts Society are included in a V&A display on the history of computer-generated art, entitled Digital pioneers. In addition, the project is contributing to the development of the Museum’s procedures for dealing with time-based media.

This article provides an overview of the status quo with regard to collecting and preserving born-digital cultural heritage objects in the Netherlands. Since there, as elsewhere, the cultural heritage sector is still grappling with the realities of web 2.0, the article also offers some more speculative thoughts on where web 2.0 may take us, as well as some practical suggestions for the next steps cultural heritage organisations could take.

Born-digital design records are among the most interesting and challenging digital objects that archivists have to preserve. Currently transitioning from 2-D to 3-D computer-aided design imaging applications in proprietary file formats, design firms and their future archivists face real obstacles in preserving and making these materials accessible in the long term. This article examines three recent web projects/resources in Europe and North America that have attempted to establish guidelines and standards for archiving these objects, and discusses upcoming projects at the British Architectural Library’s Drawings & Archives Collections to tackle collecting born-digital design records.

Showcasing work has always been at the heart of the arts community, whether it be through an exhibition, site-specific installation or performance. Representation of the original work has also been important and use of print-based options like exhibition catalogues is now complemented by websites and multimedia friendly services like Flickr and YouTube and Vimeo. These services also provide options for sharing born-digital material. For those working in higher education there is a need to profile both the personal and the institutional aspects of creative outputs. The KULTUR project created a model for arts-based institutional repositories and it is hoped that this approach will be useful for other arts institutions.

Wider social, cultural and technological changes are precipitating transformations in higher education. There is increasing need for universities and specialist colleges to operate effectively in a global online environment. The development of accessible and re-usable online teaching and learning materials has provided challenges to staff and institutions. This article explores aspects of the UK Open Educational Resources Programme and, in particular, the Art Design and Media Open Educational Resources (ADM-OER) Project which has sought to examine the processes, challenges and opportunities open educational resources (OERs) present to these ‘creative’ disciplines. Part of the project has explored art, design and media tutors’ perceptions of the shift to ‘teaching in public’ and we share some preliminary findings.

The author describes a librarian’s effort in community-building in an academic setting, through the development of a podcast radio interview program. The paper addresses the professional rationale for this type of outreach endeavor, the communities served, types of content, the labor involved, tools employed and technical requirements, as well as the question of audience.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has been running an illustration awards competition for nearly 40 years. This aims to recognise and reward the best quality illustration in books, newspapers, magazines and comics. However, the awards have suffered from being extremely labour-intensive, had a very low level of awareness in the industry amongst publishers and artists and produced minimal permanent records of the quality and range of their annual output. Recently the museum has begun addressing these issues.