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.

The Frick Art Reference Library has one of the world’s richest historic collections of catalogs of art sold at auction. Awareness and use of this collection has increased as independent scholars and the staff of museums rigorously investigate issues of provenance. Another factor in the increasing recognition of auction sale catalogs is their value as economic documents that may shed light on broader trends, topics that sometimes resonate beyond the field of art historical scholarship.

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.

At the 2003 ARLIS/UK & Ireland Annual Conference, Creative partnerships, at the University of Sussex, a workshop entitled Documenting electronic resources: standards and challenges attracted delegates interested in exploring the practical and theoretical issues raised by cataloguing electronic resources in traditional library environments. This article further details recent changes made to the Anglo-American cataloguing rules to accommodate various types of e-resources. While quasi-established methods of representing such resources have undergone substantial revision, new metadata schemes are emerging and divisions between respective repositories containing different material types are disintegrating. Adapted or entirely new workflows for managing cataloguing of e-resources are under development (TrackER) and a fundamental restructuring of the very framework for relating data in bibliographic records to the needs of users (FRBR) may impact significantly on the representation of e-resources in library OPACs. Do these developments in any sense touch the library user whose ‘infosphere’ is underpinned by the seamlessness of Google’s PageRank algorithm and will the Research Libraries Group’s pilot service RedLightGreen sufficiently ‘Google-ize’ what libraries provide for these users?

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.

The Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, founded in 1864, has been available to students, researchers and professionals from the art world as a place of reference which does not charge ever since it moved to the rue de Rivoli in 1904. Its bibliographic database of 100,000 records can be consulted on-site or over the internet. But perhaps its most distinctive feature is the extensive Maciet iconographic collection, whose loose-leaf albums cover the walls of the reading room and contain over a million images classified by subject; this is currently being digitised.

The Union Catalog of Art Images (UCAI) is a research and development project located at the University of California, San Diego, and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first phase explored the barriers, both practical and theoretical, to creating a union catalogue and tackled problems such as the mapping of non-standardized metadata to a common record and the ingest of those records into a prototype union catalogue. Two of the biggest challenges were record clustering (using automated techniques to identify duplicate or closely-related records and bring them together), and working with hierarchical records (works and their surrogate images). The second phase, now under way and ending in mid-2005, will move the prototype union catalogue closer to production-level quality.

The auctioneer walks into the room, glances at his auction book and picks up his gavel. In this account of the process that lies behind the familiar sales catalogues held in so many art library collections the author highlights the differences between the sales of nearly 250 years ago and those of today. And it is clear that there can be occasions when all does not go quite as smoothly as intended.

The Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris (INHA), whose Library will open in 2008, will have one of the best collections of sales catalogues in the world, already estimated at more than 200,000 items. In 2003, in order to improve access, INHA undertook the retrospective conversion of the records describing this material. The establishment of a committee of librarians and researchers charged with developing the Library’s acquisition policy is providing an opportunity to review the future development of the collection as well as the possibility of creating a worldwide network of information, based in France, in this subject area.

Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO) is a standards-based project developed under the auspices of the Visual Resources Association (VRA). CCO addresses the metadata needs of communities that work with a broad range of artistic or cultural works and associated images of those works. CCO provides guidelines for selecting, ordering and formatting descriptive data used to populate catalog records. This article gives the background to the project and the involvement of the user communities in the development of the guide, as well as describing future directions.

In July of 2003 Corbis Corporation began an initiative to offer educational institutions fair-use access to the world’s largest and most diverse archive of digital images. At a time when many visual resource collections are struggling with how to satisfy the digital needs of their faculty and students, Corbis is hoping to help meet this challenge. Our experience with digital archive development and image management, albeit on a larger scale, closely mirrors much of what visual resource collections are tasked with today. This article introduces readers to Corbis and gives details about our collection of images, outlining what is available through the new Corbis Education program.

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.

Thirty years ago new computer technology made it possible for libraries to develop co-operative solutions for technical services. It was at that time that a small group of art librarians worked together to create SCIPIO – the Sales Catalog Index Project Input Online – in an innovative effort to streamline bibliographic control over their auction sales catalog collections. Driven by advancing technological changes and the move toward standardization, the database has since evolved to become the most comprehensive source for bibliographic control and access for auction sales catalogs.

The Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland provides information on around 1250 buildings of architectural or historic merit that are considered to be at risk. Ranging from large baronial castles to small vernacular farmhouses, or from former factories to redundant churches, all represent considerable restoration opportunities. Established in 1990 by the Scottish Civic Trust on behalf of Historic Scotland, the Register was the first of its kind in the UK and is now emulated nationally. In April 2004, the Scottish Civic Trust embarked upon an exciting new chapter with the launch of www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk.

The papers generated by the research organisation ‘Mass-Observation’ provide a unique and insightful account of everyday life in the UK, documenting the years from 1937 until the mid-1950s. Using a variety of research methods (including in the early years photography and painting), Mass-Observation set about recording the lives of people throughout the country. In 1981 a new version of Mass-Observation was launched, based in the original Archive at the University of Sussex. Hundreds of volunteers record their own lives mostly in writing but also sometimes in images, in response to a variety of themes sent to them by the Archive. Research access is possible to both early and recent material.

By the 1990s, fashion studies’ relegation to the marginalia of art historical discourse had greatly diminished. During the same period, US fashion itself emerged from European domination, with the action centring on New York City. Conveniently, New York’s art, design and fashion libraries, archives and special collections were already the most wide-ranging anywhere and, propelled by multi-disciplinary-, multi-media-driven interests, they have continued to expand their collections in all areas of fashion research and design, as well as in fashion’s innumerable contiguous fields. While discussing the multiple research resources available to New York-based historians of dress, fashion designers and clothing industry affiliates, this article examines issues of choice and magical serendipity in the context of an at-times overwhelming plethora of information.