The Prado-Recoletos axis is the main historical boulevard in Madrid, which contains the most important concentration of art museums in all of Spain: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. In the last years, they have undergone extensive renovation. The different renovation projects can be used to examine how museum libraries today juggle the needs of their users while addressing the challenge of providing the services of a modern research library. The new State Museum Libraries Network (BIMUS) has been an important factor in this development.

The London College of Communication (LCC) Zine Collection was founded in July 2009 and now contains more than 4,000 zines. It is the most heavily used special collection at LCC Library. This article outlines the history and development of the collection, its uses in teaching, learning and research, and its value for widening access to, and representing diversity in an academic library environment.

The PHAROS online search platform is now open and free to use by researchers of all types. The online portal at artresearch.net has been developed using ResearchSpace software and funded through grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and the Samuel H. Kress Foundations. This initial version of the portal includes the holdings of seven Pharos institutions, numbering over 2.8 million images. In the coming months, additional PHAROS members will add their holdings to the online portal, bringing the number of images represented to over 25 million.

Artotheks, collections of works of art whose sole purpose is to be lent to the public, have existed in Norway since 1958/60. 7-8% of Norwegian public libraries developed rather small scale artothek-collections during the 60’s and early 70’s. After a period of decline and stagnation the activity was revitalized in 1983, through a pilot project based on the central organisation of acquisition, distribution, and circulation of original prints to six public libraries and hospital libraries, relieving them of all tasks except the actual lending routines. The culmination of this pilot project was the foundation of the Artothek Centre (Stiftelsen Artoteksentralen) in 1986. The Artothek Centre circulates small collections of prints to libraries throughout the country on a subscription basis, and has so far been a success. The prints are lent to the public free of charge.

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Renier Collection of Children’s Books provides a rich resource for research into book production as well as social history. Publishers’ cloth bindings have developed in a visually vibrant way that provides clues to the production dates of the books, as well as encouraging reflections on how they were marketed across the Victorian era and early 20th century. Questions also arise, such as, what was the relationship between the reader and cover? How did the cover designs reflect the times in which they were created? And, how different are our paperback era designs to those of the period when cloth was used?

The overall problem of professional education for Italian librarians arises from the lack of specific schools of librarianship. Librarians must learn ‘on the job’. However, the inauguration of BiArte, the Italian Art Libraries Association, in 1988, has provided a forum through which art librarians can share their experience, knowledge and enthusiasm, and further their professional education … even if it cannot of itself win for librarians the professional image which only a sound, basic training in librarianship can provide.

Illuminated manuscripts, beer bottle labels, photographs of street furniture, pieces of Regency wallpaper and early films of the Royal Sussex Regiment all appear on the Art and Design Books in Brighton web site. They are just some of the items held in library and archival collections in Brighton & Hove that are relevant to the study of art and design history. This paper describes the smallest and newest of the collaborative collection management projects of the UK’s Research Support Libraries Programme.

The literature of archaeology reflects the development of archaeology as a discipline, from the curiosity of wealthy amateurs to serious enquiry utilising scientific method and techniques and drawing on other disciplines in its efforts to interpret objects as evidence of their times. Archaeology libraries thus contain rare (often large and fragile) early works, specialised and highly detailed studies, works not obviously related to archaeology, and texts in several languages; such libraries are most usually associated with academic institutions, of which the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Bryn Mawr College offer contrasting (though neighbouring) examples. Both libraries - the University Museum more so than Bryn Mawr College - serve a larger public beyond the institution’s own community, at least to a limited extent. Archaeology libraries can nourish the widespread and growing public interest in ancient civilisations in spite of the rarefied and valuable nature of their collections, by participating in library networks, and by encouraging the publication or reprinting of books for the non-specialist.

While Printer to the University of Oxford, John Johnson began to collect printed ephemera as evidence of the history of social life in general and of printing in particular. The present-day collection, the scope and organisation of which is described, is held in the Bodleian Library.

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is acknowledged as one of the finest small art galleries in Europe. It has a richly resourced library which functions both as a curatorial library for the Barber’s curators and as part of the University of Birmingham’s network of site libraries. Students of art history thus benefit from the combined resources of a specialist art gallery library and a major university library. The Barber also houses a visual resources library, music library and coin study room.

Exhibition catalogues, in spite of being an important aspect of art documentation, too often escape the notice of both libraries and bibliographies; their existence may be unsuspected and they may disappear without trace. With support from the British Library, ARLIS/UK & Eire is currently conducting a comprehensive survey of exhibition catalogue production and acquisition in England over a period of twelve months; the survey involves the active participation of art librarians throughout the country as regional co-ordinators and local collectors, and it constitutes a study of the feasibility of a permanent collecting network. Such a network is desirable, not least to supplement the national system of legal deposit and to provide data for inclusion in the British National Bibliography.

The Corporation of London (the local authority for the City) recently launched COLLAGE, a powerful custom-designed visual information system, whose aim is to transform public accessibility to the extensive visual collections held in its libraries and galleries. Over a period of eighteen months a dedicated team of staff photographed, digitised and indexed over 30,000 works of art as the result of an intensive data imaging project. So far the works are drawn from the Guildhall Library and Guildhall Art Gallery - collections particularly renowned for their strength in material relating to London, which is now widely and easily accessible on dedicated workstations in the City, as well as via the Internet.

Art librarians in Canada find themselves in the position of Janus, who simultaneously turns one face to the past and the other toward the future. They have the responsibility to care for collections from the past; at the same time they face a future of continuous change, escalating costs, dwindling resources and institutional agendas. Long-range planning is essential, and an up-to-date collection development policy is fundamental for identifying strengths and weaknesses, confirming commitments and setting priorities. The National Gallery of Canada Library (NGCL) has recently developed a draft collection policy which is now under review within and outside the Gallery. In addition to considerations of selection and bibliographic control, the policy deals with related companion activities such as evaluation, interpretation, and preservation.

In a Herculean effort to distribute information about art collections on a previously unknown scale, museums, arts organizations, libraries, and archives have been hard at work developing standards and implementing testbed projects, large-scale union databases which integrate and disseminate information. Two such projects are ‘Conceptual and Intermedia Online’ (CIAO) and ‘Museums and the Online Archive of California’ (MOAC), both using the Encoded Archival Description to describe and provide access to art and other cultural collections. But what is the future of such collaborations and the content portals they spawn? Will they be able to scale up to include hundreds or thousands of institutions, using current models? What are the limitations for such consortia? What are the limitations for participating institutions? Several options appear on the horizon, and one simple need suggests looking to decentralization, and back to the individual institution, for the solution to sharing art and cultural content on a truly vast scale.

Art academy libraries belong to institutions that deal primarily with the development of artists. As a result the library usually functions in an environment where a great deal of experiment, research and study is going on, and is there as a resource for the students as they produce their visual and written work. When I was asked to write an article about them, I decided to make visits to several similar libraries in the Netherlands so that I could compare their characteristics, use and users.

Photography has long been a part of the Library of Congress classification tables. At the time of its inclusion, photography was not considered an art form and thus was placed in the T – Technology schedule instead of the N – Fine Arts schedule. This article will discuss various aspects of photography classification, including its history, the reasons behind and development of alternative schedules, the challenges of classifying artists’ books with a photographic basis, and the feasibility of maintaining alternative schedules with the proliferation of shelf-ready books.