A brief outline is given of events which in 1979 led to the Art and Design Library being moved out of the main faculty block at Grand Parade into an adjacent building. This is followed by a description and assessment of the improved facilities in the new library.

Acknowledgements are due to Leslie Willmot, site librarian from 1962-1977, for his help with information on the development of the Library. Photographs courtesy of Zul Mukhida.

Excellent organisational and communication skills, familiarity with available digital technology, and the ability to anticipate new developments are attributes art librarians require if they are to continue to be respected and valued professionals. Collaboration between museums, knowledge-sharing and merging library collections will cause individual museum libraries to disappear or be transformed into knowledge centres affiliated with museum collections. These will be a forum for discussion and the exchange of ideas between researchers and intellectuals who share a common passion. The infrastructure for art-related information will be a digital research environment where the indexing of research material is both unambiguous and exhaustive and integrally available.

The British Library, the UK’s national library, has often been described as a ‘hidden treasure’, with a huge amount of material and expertise which could support the creative sector, including graphic design, product design, the performing arts and fashion. During a recent visit Zandra Rhodes, the renowned fashion designer, called the Library a ‘Pandora’s Box’.

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.

Latin American culture is very rich, yet there is insufficient documentation on Latin American art, and much of the documentation which does exist is not adequately covered by the major art indexes. A number of magazines have set out, especially since the 1940s, to disseminate information about Latin American art, but most have been short-lived. The LATINOARTE project, based in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), aims to develop and to network a database including citations to documentation available in 62 libraries and information centres inside and outside Latin America. Already, some 1,500 records are available on contemporary Latin American art. (The edited text of a paper presented to the IFLA Section of Art Libraries at the IFLA General Conference at Havana, August 1994.)

AVAIL came into being as a means of connecting more or less isolated professionals working with visual arts collections, ARLIS/UK & Eire (as it then was) having failed to meet the needs of colleagues in Ireland. The idea of an association for Ireland was hatched at a conference organised by ARLIS/UK with the IFLA Section of Art Libraries in April, 1992; AVAIL was subsequently inaugurated the following October. AVAIL is inter-national, in that it represents the whole island of Ireland; it also represents the broad spectrum of visual arts information management, not just librarianship. As one of its first tasks AVAIL is preparing a directory of visual arts information providers in Ireland. AVAIL’S very existence has apparently persuaded the Department of Library and Information Studies at University College Dublin to incorporate some specialist art training as an option in their programme of education for librarianship, and AVAIL – perhaps in cooperation with ARLIS/UK & Ireland – plans to meet the training needs of its members. AVAIL has adopted as its aims not only to provide a cooperative network for the provision and exchange of visual arts information, but also to ensure preservation and conservation of all Irish visual arts materials. AVAIL is working closely with ARLIS/UK & Ireland, and a joint conference of the two bodies is to take place in Dublin and Belfast in 1995. (This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 25th Anniversary Conference of ARLIS/UK & Ireland, London 7th-10th April 1994).

Although its replacement has not yet been fully developed, the traditional book is likely to be largely superseded in the foreseeable future by electronic publishing. Libraries will become book museums; with librarians as curators; many other librarians will find themselves dealing with unlimited and unpackaged information rather than with pre-packaged artefacts, in a role which will include facilitating and championing public access to information. The electronic ‘virtual library’ will encompass visual as well as verbal information; it will subsume art libraries except insofar as art libraries will become museums, but both the ‘virtual library’ and art libraries will continue to require the skills and vision of art librarians. Finally, in the short term, and perhaps indefinitely, the ‘virtual library’ and the ‘book library’ may not diverge to the extent of parting company altogether: the latter may continue to function as one gateway providing access to the latter.

The most important bibliography for Dutch art is the Bibliography of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie). This bibliography, first published in 1943, is in fact a continuation in another form of H. van Hall, Repertorium voor de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche schilder - en graveerkunst sedert het begin van de 12de eeuw tot het eind van 1932 (Repertory for the history of Dutch painting and engraving since the beginning of the 12th century up till the end of 1932), The Hague 1936 (Vol.2: 1933-1946 appeared in 1949). The last volume published, Vol.16, Part 1: Old Art, comprises the years 1971-1972; Vol.17, Part 1: Old Art, for the years 1973-1974, is in the course of publication. The material for the years after 1974, however, is put on fiches, and can be consulted at the Institute. The last volume published that included material on Dutch 19th-20th century art was Vol. 9 (1957-1958). Material for the years thereafter also can be consulted at the Institute. Address: Prins Willem Alexanderhof 5 (entrance at the fifth floor of the Royal Library), 2595 BE The Hague; tel. 070-471514. Postal address: Post box 90418, 2509 LK The Hague.

Artifact, which was officially launched in November 2003, is the arts and creative industries hub of the UK’s Resource Discovery Network. Variously described as a gateway, a hub and a subject guide, Artifact offers an alternative to commercial search engines, principally for those studying, teaching or researching arts, communications and other creative subjects within UK further and higher education, but also freely available to anyone seeking quality-assured resources online. With the support of a wide spectrum of professionals from both the educational and commercial arts sectors, Artifact is now developing into a comprehensive service that can help fulfil a wide array of information needs for potential customers from many spheres.

The papers of the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust are one result of the passion of Harvard University Professor Emeritus Eduard F. Sekler. In the 1960s he witnessed the encroachments of progress and the associated threat to buildings in the royal and religious centers of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, and co-founded the Trust in 1990 with others interested in documenting the sites and restoring the buildings. The Trust has restored numerous temples, guesthouses, townhouses and shrines in Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur, and in the process has generated vital documentation including measured drawings, photographs, contextual materials, planning reports and feasibility studies. Threats to this material from the natural environment and political turmoil, as well as longstanding ties to Harvard of several of its members, led the Trust to approach the Frances Loeb Library at the University’s Graduate School of Design, where as a result the archive will be housed. The infrastructure developed by Harvard University Library will be used to create a virtual archive available worldwide on the web, as well as a parallel paper archive to be maintained by the Trust in Nepal.

William Hunter’s bequest of 1783 forms the nucleus of the University of Glasgow’s Art Collections. It included a Rembrandt, a Koninck, three Chardins and three Stubbs. Hunter’s gift was unmatched in importance until this century which brought the gifts and bequest of 1935,1954 and 1958 respectively by Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip of the large part of James McNeill Whistler’s estate consisting of 80 oils, 100 pastels, c. 150 drawings and watercolours, 500 etchings and 140 lithographs, and the Davidson family gift and bequest of 1945 of work by Charles Rennie Mackintosh which included over 500 designs and watercolours and about 70 pieces of furniture. The general collection of c. 800 oils and 850 drawings and watercolours includes good holdings of 17th century Dutch and Flemish work, 18th century British portraits and 19th and 20th century French and Scottish painting. The print collection of over 15,000 items provides a representative selection from the late 15th century to the present day.

Looking after ephemera collections can seem quite daunting; their contents come in all shapes and sizes and they are designed to be ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. The definition of ephemera in the Oxford pocket dictionary is ‘things of only short-lived use’, which is disheartening when we are trying to preserve these fascinating items for posterity. However, there is a lot of information available about preservation and much of this is applicable to ephemera collections.

The role, as a source of information and as a vehicle of art itself, the writing, and the future, of the contemporary art magazine. A paper presented to the ARLIS International Conference on art periodicals at the University of Sussex on April 9th.

Although the ARLIS International Conference in April was primarily devoted to the study of art periodicals, considerable discussion, and one formal session, concerned the desirability of an international art libraries society, ARLIS International. With delegates from Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Eire, France, Germany, Holland, Nigeria, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, it was apparent that some consensus of opinion could be taken which would reflect the need for international cooperation between art libraries.

This article describes some unusual ways of working with the special collections in the University of Southampton Library of Winchester School of Art. Two of these collections have proved particularly fruitful: numerous successful activities centred on the Knitting Reference Library have aroused great interest, and there is now a strategic aim of making it the primary research resource for knitting for artists, students, and researchers in the University, and also for the wider community locally, nationally and globally. The contents of the Artists’ Books Collection too are being shared with a new audience, through exhibitions, events and participation at artists’ books fairs.

Established in 1960, the Museum van het Boek is known for its holdings and exhibitions of Western book art from the last 110 years. Building on the starter collections of two donors, a private printer and a bibliophile, the Museum’s acquisitions now focus mainly on modern book art. More than 25,000 of the 450,000 objects in the Museum are books showing the development of standard Dutch publishing, the work of individual book illustrators, type designers and calligraphers, contemporary Dutch private presses and artists’ books. There is also considerable foreign material, notably from Germany and Great Britain.

The Design Archive at Brighton University, until 2004 known as the Design History Research Centre Archives, houses a number of collections which are of great value to UK and international design historians. These include the Design Council Archive and that of ICOGRADA (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations), as well as material relating to two well-known designers, James Gardner and F. H. K. Henrion. These archives, which actually relate to one another very well, were acquired somewhat serendipitously, but future additions will be chosen as the result of a more strategic planning process.

Multiple stakeholders in the scholarly publication and bibliographic lifecycle contribute to a complex network of complementary resources and services. Together, they provide a range of high-value products and services to researchers in our field. Increasingly however, the bibliographic record fails to include emergent forms and formats of scholarship, as well as relevant content beyond the traditionally circumscribed art historical domain. As a community, we need not only to develop strategies to expand and enhance the bibliographic boundary, but also to develop systems and toolkits that allow researchers to more dynamically contribute to the bibliographic enterprise.