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).

Learning about Japanese art has been difficult for Westerners. Limited access, language barriers, and cultural misunderstanding have been almost insurmountable obstacles. Knowledge of Japanese art in the West began over 150 years before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853. Englebert Kaempfer (1657-1716), sent to Japan as a physician for the Dutch East India Company, befriended a young assistant who provided information for a book on Japanese life and history published in 1727. By 1850, more ethnographic information had been published in Europe. Catalogs of sales of Japanese art in Europe exist prior to 1850 and collection catalogs from major museums follow in the second half of that century. After the Meiji Restoration (1867) cultural exchange was possible and organizations for that purpose were formed. Diaries of 19th century travellers and important international fairs further expanded cross-cultural information. Okakura Kakuzo, a native of Japan, published in English about Japanese art and ultimately became Curator of the important collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The advent of photography made visual images easily accessible to Westerners. Great collectors built up the holdings of major American museums. In the 20th century, materials written and published in Japan in English language have furthered understanding of Japanese culture. During the past twenty years, travelling exhibitions and scholarly catalogs have circulated in the West. Presently monographs, dissertations and translated scholarly texts are available. Unfortunately, there is little understanding in the West of the organization of Japanese art libraries and archives which contain primary source material of interest to art historians.

Art ephemera are an evocative resource that can document innovative art and convey diverse histories. This article looks at the relationship between such ephemera and contemporary art practices, and at the relative values given to ephemera by artists, curators and librarians and, in this context, considers integrated catalogues and online guides as methods of re-contextualising art ephemera in the library. Recent collaborative initiatives, and projects that identify and locate artists’ files are reviewed here and three themes are identified: the biographical approach, interfaces for distributed catalogues and the integration of art and its documentation.

Since their appearance in the early 20th century, catalogues prepared for exhibitions of African art have undergone a gradual transformation. Beginning as mere checklists many of these publications have, in the 1970s and 80s, evolved into major scholarly works whose significance transcends their original purpose as guides to the exhibitions. Changes occurring over the years are traced through examination of the form and content of representative catalogues and by review of the reception by art historians of many of these works into the corpus of literature of African art. The growing importance of exhibition catalogues as important art historical documents is also demonstrated by a chronological analysis of bibliographic citations in the major scholarly journal of African art in the United States. Finally, scrutiny of sources and annotations included in an important bibliographic guide to the literature of African art indicates how firmly established the exhibition catalogue has become as one of the most important publication forms for the dissemination of scholarly writing on African art.

[This paper won the ARLIS/NA Gerd Muehsam Award for 1986. We hope to publish a sequel in a future issue, on exhibitions of African art in Africa and the development of catalogues written by Africans. Editor].

This article outlines the origin and development of picture lending services in Germany and the United Kingdom and explains the cross-fertilisation of ideas between Germany and the United Kingdom which has led to the present spread of collections in both countries. However economic constraints are now affecting the working of existing services and limiting the establishment of new ones, and new methods of financial distribution are necessary.

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.

This article presents a practice-based account of collection development related to zines in the British Library. Rather than making the case for the collecting of zines, it aims to describe the process of collection building in a specific time and place, so that researchers have a better understanding of why certain resources are offered to them and others are not, and to share experiences with other librarians with zine collections. Zines form an element of the cultural memory of activists and cultural creators, and for researchers studying them it would seem useful to make transparent the motivations, methods and limitations of collection building. Librarians in the USA have written about their collecting practices for some time, for instance at Barnard College1 and New York Public Library2, there has been less written about the practices of UK libraries. The article aims to make a contribution as a case study alongside accounts of collection development in a range of other libraries with zine collections, and it is written primarily from my own perspective as a curator in Contemporary British Collections since 2015, focusing on current practice, with some reference to earlier collecting.

From the outset ARLIS has consistently published serials, from the ARLIS Newsletter to the present Art Libraries Journal (with its international role) and the ARLIS News-sheet (for current and domestic information). An annual Directory of Members has provided vital information about ARLIS membership. Monographs and occasional publications, some published by ARLIS and some in collaboration with other publishers, have included a variety of manuals, guidelines, directories, indexes and union lists. A full list of publications is appended.

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.

In part one of this article, published in vol. 39, no. 3 2014, I described how the History and Theory of Art and Design Slide Library at Cardiff is to be reinvented as a visual resources collection by being put to new and creative uses. Here in part two I consider possible arguments for safeguarding at least one exemplar slide library to be preserved intact and exactly as it was when used for art school lectures. The arguments put forward are derived from the Florence Declaration to which ARLIS/UK & Ireland is a recent signatory. Were the arguments successful in persuading the art and design and library communities that such a collection should be preserved? I end by profiling the set of circumstances I believe would need to co-exist before any institution would find such a project to be practically, financially, culturally and intellectually viable.

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.

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 Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, based at Los Angeles, has developed rapidly since its foundation in 1969. The Resource and Research Center, established in 1975, has from its beginning aimed to achieve and to promote services of the highest quality. The Center comprises specialised units and a central core; the specialised units include two subject divisions (Textiles, Interior Design) which house appropriate collections (such as fabric swatches and trade literature), a Costume Library (a collection of over 2,000 garments and accessories), and the International Fashion Video Library which will be the subject of a separate article in a future issue of the Art Libraries Journal. A comprehensive user education programme is complemented by outreach activities and special events; the Center also lends itself to the role of promoting the FIDM in the community and strengthening its ties with industry.

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.

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.)

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.

artlibraries.net, formerly the VKK, is an international specialised meta catalogue allowing the integrated retrieval of bibliographic records and, should the occasion arise, other objects from distinctive art historical databases. This article analyses artlibraries.net from a functional point of view, but also discusses the cataloguing and subject indexing practice prevailing in art libraries internationally. It aims to identify some parameters for the future of art bibliography.

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.

Founded in Montréal in 1980, the Centre d’information Artexte is a non-profit organisation devoted to the collection and distribution of information on all aspects of contemporary visual arts. The organisation has developed two subject areas in support of its objective (the exhibition catalogue and Canadian art) and sponsors activities on 3 fronts (documentation, distribution and publication). The Centre d’information Artexte’s collections are noted for their comprehensive holdings in contemporary art (1965-). A bibliographic database was developed by the Centre to support advanced research in contemporary art. A bilingual tool, it indexes indepth information found within the exhibition catalogue. Artexte serves both the French and English communities in Canada and promotes Canadian publications in contemporary art abroad.