Although the library of the Fashion Museum of Province of Antwerp is only five years old, it already boasts an exciting history. Evolved from the collection of the national Vrieselhof Textiles and Costume Museum, the Fashion Museum Library opened its doors in 2002, in the heart of Antwerp, the Fashion City. This article relates the history of this library, with a look at both today and the future, attempting to pinpoint the uniqueness of what it means to manage a collection on the phenomenon of ‘contemporary fashion’.

The Delft University of Technology Library, the oldest technical library in the Netherlands, is the national focal point for collecting literature on the applied sciences and technology. A major part of this collection covers applied and visual arts, with works from the sixteenth and seventeenth century based on Vitruvius, others by Palladio, Serlio or Dutch architects like Hendrik de Keyser, and contextual material on architecture and the fine arts. The Treasury aims to be both a nationally and an internationally known collection of technological literature.

A case study concerning the in-house digitization of a small collection of Central Saint Martins graduate fashion shows. The background of the collection is outlined (VHS and DVD recordings spanning from 1979 to present), as well as the workflow put in place to deal with the technical aspects of recording, cataloguing, processing and archiving an audio-visual collection with minimal budget and staffing.

In the last third of the 19th century, Berlin was the undisputed capital of the German clothing and fashion industry on an international scale. Several publishing houses specialized in the production of fashion magazines for different target groups. One of the success stories in this context is that of the publisher Franz Lipperheide and his wife Frieda. In 1865, they founded their own company, publishing the journal Die Modenwelt: Illustrirte Zeitung für Toilette und Handarbeiten. This journal quickly became the most-read fashion journal in Berlin. By the company's 25th anniversary in 1890, a total of 12 international editions of the journal was published with around 500,000 subscribers. The economic success of their company allowed the Lipperheides to create extensive private collections that reflected their deep interest in cultural-historical topics as well as textile art.

This paper focuses on their collection of source material for costume studies, which is now known as the ‘Sammlung Modebild—Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek’ (Fashion Image Collection—Lipperheide Costume Library), a department of the Kunstbibliothek at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The paper presents its history, some collection highlights and the various means of access (catalogues, exhibition catalogues and online access).

The Centre des livres d’artistes (cdla), which has been based in S aint-Yrieix-la-Perche since 1994, is the culmination of a project initiated at the end of the 1980s by the association Pays-paysage. After many years during which it lacked anywhere to develop its activities fully, the cdla has at last been installed in a refurbished building and opened early in 2005 with a new exhibition of books and publications by herman de vries. The two principal activities of the cdla are the creation and management of a collection of artists’ books (currently nearly 3000 items), and the organisation of exhibitions in France and also abroad.

The loan of works of art to the public was initiated in the Netherlands in 1955 through a scheme set up by a group of artists to encourage people to purchase contemporary art. The success of this scheme attracted support from the government, which was itself acquiring works in the process of assisting artists. Works thus acquired were lent to public institutions and government bodies, but from the 1970s they were also made available for loan to the public via artotheques. These two schemes gave rise to over a hundred art lending centres including hybrid establishments owing something to both; however, direct government support of artists has recently been phased out, and as a result artotheques no longer obtain works via the government and must evolve alternative methods of acquisition.

During the last fifteen years, Japanese museums and institutions, which previously kept art historical information very much to themselves, have begun to take steps to make information and research materials more accessible. In several cases, museums have founded their own research and information centres. At the same time, the use of computers has been introduced in the humanities, and the potential of the computer as a means of organising, exchanging, and providing access to art historical and bibliographical data is being explored. These “new trends” are being spearheaded by art historians and museums; art librarians are now contributing to the dialogue, and although the concept of the “art library” remains relatively undeveloped in Japan, the time is ripe for art librarianship to flourish.

Liberty’s textile archive is probably unique in the way it is set up, both through its ownership and in its make-up. It shows only one aspect of the firm’s history, although arguably its most important one. It is of interest not only because of the Liberty fabrics, but for 19th-century textiles in general, as it includes material from most of that century. The main purpose of the archive is to act as a reference library for the in-house studios; however, limited access is offered to specialist users from outside the company.

Wolfgang Freitag’s seminal article, ‘The indivisibility of art librarianship’, published in the Art libraries journal in 1982, occasioned a revisiting of the premises of that article for the historic joint conference of ARLIS/NA and the Visual Resources Association in St. Louis in 2001 to see how his thesis stood the test of time. The two articles that follow, one each by Wolfgang Freitag and Martha Mahard, are reflections on the original article and the course of events in the intervening twenty years. They are published jointly, here and in Art documentation.

ARLIS Norge was conceived at the IFLA Conference at Munich in August, 1983, and held its first annual meeting in Oslo on 25th January 1984. Its membership includes all art librarians and art libraries in Norway. Meetings are held regularly, and courses and study visits are also organised from time to time. The newsletter ARLIS Nytt is published four times a year. ARLIS Norge participates in ARLIS Norden and in the IFLA Section of Art Libraries, and actively fosters international relations. During the last five years, ARLIS Norge has established a bibliographic database on Norwegian art history, KUNSTBIB. Current and future concerns include art resources in public libraries, education for art librarianship, and the need for a Norwegian thesaurus of art terms. (This is an English translation of an article which was published in Norwegian in ARLIS Nytt 1993 no. 3/4 p. 1-4).

My employment as a slide curator followed a fascination with the slide lectures given by my studio instructors that revealed what interested and inspired them. Working daily with a slide collection is rewarding in providing resources for those teaching and studying the history of art. It provides me in turn with an overview of how art changes and repeats itself both in content and style, as governments rise, fall and merge, and religious beliefs and social conditions change.

In 1989, the Japan Art Documentation Society (JADS) was born, with inspiration received from members of overseas art library organisations – ARLIS/UK and Ireland, ARLIS/NA, ARLIS/ANZ and others – who attended the 52nd General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in Tokyo in 1986. However, JADS was very definitely JADS: it did not try to become ARLIS/Japan. What reasoning lay behind the choice of the society’s name? And after its establishment what path did JADS follow: what role did it take on for itself as the framework for joint projects in the art library community in Japan? What were the activities that it aimed to provide to enhance collaboration between museums, libraries and archives? Focussing mainly on the growing interest in Japan in recent years in creating networks between museums, libraries and archives, and on the opening in 2004 of the Art Libraries’ Consortium (ALC), a union catalogue of art libraries based in the Tokyo metropolitan area which has been steadily expanding, this article gives a chronological overview of the developments that have taken place in art libraries and art documentation in Japan from 1986 to 2012.

Successor to Thieme-Becker and Vollmer, those great standard reference works for art history, the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon is an even more ambitious undertaking which will eventually include entries for between 450,000 and 500,000 artists. The data will be published in a number of ways: in book format (including a couple of spin-off versions in hard copy), CD-ROM and, increasingly, online. This article describes the developments one AKL editor has witnessed in the production process for the projected 80 volumes of the complete work, and outlines its role as an authority for artists’ names.

From its position at the heart of the Cinémathèque française in Paris, the Bibliothèque du film provides all sorts of users with a unique documentary collection on the cinema: monographs, journals, posters, drawings, photographs, archives and videos. The reading rooms, the vidéothèque, the image library and the archive search room allow users to consult all these documents.

Mexico has played an important role in art and architecture since the prehispanic period, and has contributed not only to the spread of Mexican culture but also to the enrichment of the art world in general. But Mexican art and architecture have been poorly covered by indexes and abstracts, possibly because many of the relevant periodicals have been short-lived, or because of the use of the Spanish language, or due to intermittent financial resources. Nevertheless creators of bibliographical tools such as databases in Mexico are convinced of their country’s cultural richness, and are committed to spreading information in this subject area, whatever difficulties may be encountered.

Following Nicole Picot’s visit to England, the subject of the report printed above, Gillian Varley from the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London spent two weeks at the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, during the summer of 1988. She also visited a number of other art libraries in Paris. The text of her report is followed by extracts from her diary of her trip.