The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Word and Image Department holds an estimated 750,000 prints, drawings, paintings and photographs. Recent acquisitions have been catalogued using the Museum’s Collections Information System, but the vast majority of earlier acquisitions are still only described in a wide range of card indexes and printed catalogues. The indexes have been scanned, but the Museum now needs to complete the transfer of the catalogue records to its online system. The ‘Factory’ digitisation project was established in November 2007, with the intention of digitising the Department’s entire holdings and making them available online. Some 15,000 objects have been photographed in the first year, and cataloguing is also under way. The digital images and catalogue descriptions will be made available online via the Museum’s website as the project proceeds.

The history, development and objectives of the Art Libraries Section of the Association of French Librarians are discussed. Recent achievements include the publication of the French Art Librarians’ Yearbook and the Directory of Art History Libraries and Documentation Centres in the Paris Area as well as current work on a computerised list of art periodicals.

Higher education in the UK has always needed images, especially in the field of art and design, and institutions have built up their own slide libraries to service that demand. Latterly however it is digital images that are being sought by lecturers and students and numerous products are being produced to accommodate this need. Slide librarians need to educate themselves about these new products and update their skills in order to continue to ensure that their specialist knowledge of image use at higher education level is applied by the new developers.

This article traces the history of Canadian art publishing from the eighteenth century to date, closely paralleling the development of art historical scholarship in the country. A statistical survey of art publishing 1975–80 is followed by details of recently published key works in the fields of architecture, sculpture, painting, drawing, graphic arts, folk decorative arts, photography, North American Indian and Eskimo art. A substantial bibliography is appended. This paper was delivered to the Section of Art Libraries at the 1982 IFLA Council in Montreal.

This article describes the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, a unique archive of experimental art forms from the 1960s to the present, and how students and the general public make use of its welcoming access policies. It further addresses conservation efforts as they apply to a setting that strongly emphasizes hands-on usage of materials.

The Burlington Magazine, with its juxtaposition of art trade and academia, historicism and aestheticism, has occupied a unique role in the international art historical panorama since it was first published in 1903. From its very beginnings the magazine had produced a detailed printed index, which reflected the diversity of its contents. In 2005 the magazine received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to produce a cumulative online index from 1903 to the present. The Burlington Index is now online, nearly complete and free for all to use. Why did the Burlington need an index when it was already included in JSTOR? How is the Burlington Index structured and what is it based on? What are its aims and limitations? The Burlington Index wants to be a vessel to navigate the ocean of free-text available on JSTOR; a tool for research to open up the contents of the Burlington to a new generation of readers and, ultimately, a magnifying glass to reveal the magazine as a primary source for research on the history of art history, the art market and the art press.

This article consists of two lectures, combined into one, which were given at art libraries in Gentofte and in Slagelse.

The library association of Greater Copenhagen had a meeting on 21 May 1981 at Trånegarden, the art library of the municipality of Gentofte, where the president of the cultural committee in Gentofte, Professor A. Vinding Kruse contributed as follows: should public libraries arrange visual art exhibitions? – the answer was a definite yes … and librarian Helle Behmdt talked about art libraries with Trånegarden as her starting point.

The library association of the county of Vestsjælland (West Zealand) arranged a one-day conference on 26 May 1981 in Slagelse concerning: local historical archives and public libraries; municipal tape newspapers; and distribution of art in small libraries, which librarian Katrine Høffding talked about.

University College London (UCL) Library Services holds extensive Special Collections that are employed in various teaching and public engagement activities. Students and academic staff at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art have the opportunity to participate in the Slade Small Press Project that uses the UCL Small Press Collections as inspiration, recognising the current trend for printed material and text as a visual medium. UCL's BASc students, and participants at library public events focused on non-creative subjects, study ways in which the physical aspects of rare books contribute to understanding the text, with surprisingly creative outputs. While museums have recently adopted Object Based Learning (OBL) as a teaching strategy, this form of learning has long been familiar in libraries, particularly for special collections. However as readers increasingly access library text digitally, and perceive text as unaffected by medium, they are losing the skills to interpret physical books and printed material (skills we term ‘object literacy’), making OBL approaches more important than ever for library staff. In keeping with the UCL 2034 strategy, the Connected Curriculum encourages participation in research at all levels of study and OBL methods enable interdisciplinary enquiry and collaborative practices.

At the same time that visual media play an ever expanding role in culture and society, technology offers new opportunities for using them in teaching and learning, far beyond what was possible with traditional analog image collections. Faculty and staff in art and art history, the library and instructional technology at James Madison University have collaborated in the creation of the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID), an innovative online teaching and learning system, to accommodate the exploding need for visual information. MDID is an open source system for managing digital images including personal image collections and displaying them in the classroom. Its support for sharing image collections among institutions and the expanding community of users offers new opportunities for collaboration in providing visual media for teaching and learning.

In recent years museums and galleries have come under scrutiny following claims that artworks confiscated or looted during the Second World War, and still unaccounted for, have made their way into public collections. In response, many such institutions worldwide have been endeavouring to reaffirm the integrity of their collections. The Queensland Art Gallery has established a Provenance Research Team to complete its records for artworks of European origin which have missing provenance details during the period 1933-1945. This paper highlights the role the Gallery Library is taking in supporting the project.

Britain’s National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum joined the OCLC network in 1986, and from 1987 to 1990 created catalogue records in MARC format on the OCLC database pending the introduction of a stand-alone computer system. The Library now employs a Dynix minicomputer system for cataloguing, acquisitions, circulation, serials control, and the provisions of OPACs. About 15% of the Library’s records are available online. Retrospective conversion of older records is proceeding and may be completed by the year 2000. The online catalogue is networked internally within the Museum, and is likely to be accessible to external users via JANET in the future. A number of bibliographic and image databases are also provided in CD-ROM and videodisc format. Future developments will include interface between Museum/image and Library/documentation databases.

Librarians and graphic designers have a lot in common. Both are information professionals that offer means or cues to help users navigate, understand and solve a problem within a certain space. Without the librarian, the library space itself becomes the interface where users are offered signage to problem-solve intuitively. Because of this, effective communication via signage and wayfinding becomes imperative to the library user experience. By empathizing with our patrons and clearly articulating what the problem is, it is possible to anticipate user needs, address them by utilizing the design-thinking process, and prototype solutions like a graphic designer. However, this is not a permanent, one-time process, and it will need to be repeated whenever the needs of the patrons evolve and new problems emerge.

This article looks at the many problems that art libraries experience in developing video art collections. It considers a range of issues, from why it is often difficult to acquire video art, to reasons why many of the respected art library collections do not actively collect such material. Most of the findings arise from a workshop called Diverse practices, which was held at Kent Institute of Art and Design in February 2003.

The Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago started collecting, or rather, receiving artists’ books more than fifteen years ago. Access by author and title having proved inadequate, an automated catalog has been used to access the collection through a range of descriptors (including physical characteristics) since 1988. A prototype of a revised version of this automated system, version 3, is in the process of being developed. Of particular significance, this version, written using FoxPro2 software, will include a file of images of the artists’ books.

Le projet d’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) a une longue histoire, qu’il serait trop long de détailler dans le cadre de cet article. Je préfère me réjouir de la bonne nouvelle: l’INHA va enfin voir le jour.

L’INHA doit s’installer rue Vivienne et rue de Richelieu, dans une partie des locaux libérés par les Départements des Imprimés et des Périodiques et par certains services de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Le bâtiment Colbert, rue Vivienne, abritera les activités de recherche et d’enseignement au niveau du 3e cycle, ainsi que les espaces destinés à l’accueil, aux rencontres scientifiques et aux expositions, tandis que la bibliothèque et l’iconothèque documentaire seront rassemblées rue de Richelieu.

La Mission interministérielle des Grands Travaux a conduit une étude de programmation. Elle a permis de prévoir, dans le détail, l’utilisation des lieux dans le bâtiment Vivienne et de tracer les grandes lignes d’une implantation de l’Institut dans le quadrilatère Richelieu, à côté des Départements spécialisés de la BnF, appelés à se redéployer: Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Département des Manuscrits, Département des Cartes et Plans, Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, Département de la Musique, Département des Arts du spectacle.

Growing from modest beginnings in 1898, the collection was reorganised after the Second World War and now totals more than half a million slides. These are listed in a catalogue on site and in printed catalogues and lists which are available to libraries and individuals; slides are retrieved by accession number from electrically-operated storage units. Slides may be borrowed free of charge, in person or by post, by any resident of the United Kingdom.

Since 1990 the National Life Story Collection has documented the lives of almost eighty of Britain’s visual artists by means of in-depth tape-recordings, often completed over many months. Cathy Courtney, Project Officer of Artists’ Lives, describes the evolution of an initiative which will subtly alter the context in which historians of the future come to assess the art of our time.

The Johannesburg Art Gallery opened in 1915. A collection of books intended for the Gallery, but housed elsewhere pending the completion of the building, became the separate Michaelis Art Library; the Gallery gradually formed its own library, for the use of the curators. In 1986 the Gallery Library was accommodated in a new wing. Selection for the Library has reflected the Gallery’s diverse collecting activities. Latterly, the Library has worked closely with the Gallery’s education department, and as a result its resources have been made available to the wider community. In 1994 the Library was given a major art slide collection by the Rand Afrikaans University; in the same year, it received funding for the computerisation of its catalogue, which will be accessible through SABINET. Work is in progress on an index of South African art.

Exhibition catalogues are a key resource for art and design research, but smaller and more ephemeral catalogues are difficult for art librarians to collect. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a period of interest in the UK in the problems of collecting and cataloguing exhibition catalogues sparked off research into fresh approaches to the problem. In line with the resulting recommendations the National Art Library, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, has developed two key initiatives. These are the Exhibition Catalogues Programme and a joint project with the British Library to increase access to smaller exhibition catalogues. Both are showing clear benefits for national access to published exhibition documentation.

At the Tiré à part conference held in Quebec city in October 2003, speakers from artist-run centres from across Canada discussed 30 years of experience in publishing. Themes such as audience, production, funding, professionalisation and distribution encouraged the identification and exploration of current issues. These are put in context here by a general overview of the development of the genre as well as a short history of production by artist-run centres such as Art Metropole, Artspeak, Artexte and the Bookmobile project.