Cultural institutions the world over share certain key characteristics: the care of the items in their collection, the means of enabling access to these items, and the task of sustaining their ability to do both of these things. In the past decade, digitisation and supply of digital content has become increasingly important for museums and galleries wanting to disseminate their content to a global audience. What processes are involved in doing this, and how have they impacted on organisations and their working practices? What role do intellectual property rights play in this, and what are the associated challenges and opportunities in this area? This article will present the perspective of the National Portrait Gallery, London, investigating the history of its digitisation activities and its ongoing commitment to access and responsible IPR management through Picture Library licensing and image management activities.

The Biblioteca degli Uffizi acts as a documentary ‘black box’ for all the notable collecting that has taken place in Florence during the past 500 years. The Library’s collections stretch from the autograph 22-year diary of the 15th-century painter Neri di Bicci and the different editions of Vasari’s Lives of the painters, through the inventories and lists of objects acquired and held successively by the Medici, the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine and the new Italian united kingdom, and to all the memoirs and plans and catalogues of the directors and ‘royal antiquarians’ of the Uffizi Gallery. In addition it contains major works on art history, artists, public and private art collections, exhibitions and many related topics. The Library holds 77,000 printed books and more than 440 manuscripts; its catalogue is shared with the IRIS consortium of art history and humanities libraries and contributes to artlibraries.net through this shared bibliographic database. Several digitisation projects have already been completed or are currently in progress.

Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books, is at the forefront of exploring born-digital material in the North East of England. The Centre has met many challenges on its quest to acquire, preserve and provide access to born-digital material. This article describes these challenges and how Seven Stories has approached them, and how the Centre is using born-digital material at present.

The University of Brighton Design Archives, strongly embedded in the research context of the university’s design practice and history activities, has participated in a number of collaborative higher education initiatives to digitise groups of material for cross-collection searching or in learning packages. Such project-based activities, common to many archives, may not reflect the catalogue hierarchies of the collections from which they are drawn, and consequently the full evidential value of their context. But does this matter when we consider the myriad ways in which an ever-wider range of audiences may now engage with the material, thanks to recent technological developments both inside and outside the archival community?

The Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence is a library specialising in the arts and humanities that has been open to the general public since the middle of the 18th century. Its founder, Francesco Marucelli, willed his large collection of books to the library. In 1783, the last member of the Marucelli family, Francesco di Roberto Marucelli, left the library around 2500 drawings and 30,000 engravings, and these are now being re-catalogued. The first volume of the engravings can already be consulted on a CD called PRISMA, and the records for the drawings, accompanied by digital images, will be put on a database which it is hoped will be available to scholars worldwide in 2010.

Founded in 1976, Art monthly is Britain’s oldest contemporary art magazine. It is impossible, and perhaps even unwise, to try to account for the magazine’s longevity, but a contributing factor may be the high degree of continuity between the past and present that is reflected in the loyalty of Art monthly’s readership and of its writers and regular contributors. This does not mean that the magazine has not changed at all; on the contrary. That Art monthly has adapted and responded to shifts in the art world over the years is reflected, for instance, in the large number of student subscribers to the magazine. However, change has been introduced gradually and in a manner in keeping with the founding ethos of the magazine. This is what is meant by ‘the gentle art of staying the same while changing utterly’ – the subheading for this article, and of the talk on which it is based.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the UK’s emerging national collection of early computer-generated art and design. Many of the earliest works only survive on paper, but the V&A also holds some born-digital material. The Museum is currently involved in a project to digitise the computer art collections and to make the information available online. Artworks, books and ephemera from the Patric Prince Collection and the archives of the Computer Arts Society are included in a V&A display on the history of computer-generated art, entitled Digital pioneers. In addition, the project is contributing to the development of the Museum’s procedures for dealing with time-based media.

A recent project at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has highlighted the importance of the library of private books built up by its founder. Tasks involved the identification of the items, preservation and conservation activities and bibliographic control of the collection. The most visible result is a website that provides virtual access, as well as a deeper insight, into Calouste Gulbenkian’s personal book collection. The information in the library’s catalogue has been re-organised in order to make it accessible to a wide audience with differing needs and interests.

As the world of information resources becomes more and more digital, what is the role of special collections in libraries? This paper highlights their growing importance as unique and distinctive assets in an increasingly levelled landscape. It also stresses the value of opening up access to these collections through large-scale digitisation, reflecting on the role the profession should play in leading that work.

The Courtauld Institute of Art, a college of the University of London, is one of the foremost centres to study art history in the UK. Like a giant Matruschka doll, the Book Library at the Institute is a specialist art library that contains within it special collections which, in turn, have individual bequests that also contain discrete rare collections. In addition to more than 7400 books catalogued online, it has a range of material that is yet to be catalogued onto the Aleph system, some of which remains inaccessible. The special collections also contain the research papers of several notable former members of staff, and a number of small archive collections that have been donated over the years. Without a dedicated reading room, the special collections feel more integrated into regular use within the library. This gives students a taste of research with historic books, but there are some inherent risks associated with such relaxed usage conditions. This article examines the origins of the Library and its place in the Institute today. It reveals the breadth of its special collections and some of its treasures, but also explains how the present funding crisis in UK higher education may harm the custodial role the Book Library has over this unique research resource.

This paper describes and evaluates the information-seeking behaviour of young people in the virtual environment. Data are drawn from a JISC/BL funded project on the future scholar and a seven-year study of the virtual scholar conducted by CIBER at University College London. Hundreds of thousands of young people, mainly students, from all over the globe, are covered in the log analyses. On the basis of these data, the characteristics of their ‘digital footprints’ are drawn, demonstrating the huge paradigm shift that has occurred in the information seeking of young scholars. The results are surprising, disturbing and challenging and the author concludes with a discussion of how information professionals and the arts and humanities community in general might best meet young people’s information needs.

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is acknowledged as one of the finest small art galleries in Europe. It has a richly resourced library which functions both as a curatorial library for the Barber’s curators and as part of the University of Birmingham’s network of site libraries. Students of art history thus benefit from the combined resources of a specialist art gallery library and a major university library. The Barber also houses a visual resources library, music library and coin study room.

The library of the Prado Museum has undergone major development in recent years and reached a highpoint with the opening, in 2009, of new premises in the Casón del Buen Retiro. During the past few years three important private libraries have been incorporated into the library and these, taken together with the holdings of early material that already existed and a number of recent acquisitions, have formed an important special collection of some 4500 rare books, mainly on the subject of art history.

This article provides an overview of the status quo with regard to collecting and preserving born-digital cultural heritage objects in the Netherlands. Since there, as elsewhere, the cultural heritage sector is still grappling with the realities of web 2.0, the article also offers some more speculative thoughts on where web 2.0 may take us, as well as some practical suggestions for the next steps cultural heritage organisations could take.