The art auction trade flourished in Canada as the 19th century progressed, pitting local artists against importers of European art; yet today there are relatively few preserved catalogues to show for all this activity. The National Gallery of Canada Library has been documenting the survivors, creating records in the SCIPIO database and arranging for microfilming. Individual lots have also been indexed (some of the idiosyncracies of auction catalogue entries are described below) and a Library Occasional Paper is to be published with a bibliographical listing and historical essay on the art auction in 19th-century Canada.

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.

For the past fifteen years the Getty Provenance Index has developed a series of projects that index auction catalogues, beginning with British catalogues of the 19th century and followed by French, Dutch, German and Belgian catalogues of the same period or earlier. This has led to the discovery of many previously unrecorded catalogues, most notably German and Belgian, providing a strong incentive to consider how Frits Lugt’s Répertoire des Catalogues de Ventes should eventually be revised, and even brought up to date. The Getty projects also include automating the individual items in the catalogues, which has led not only to much new data about the provenance of paintings held by museums in many parts of the world, but has also helped to identify the owners of collections found in previously anonymous sale catalogues.