Legislation in South Africa now provides for the inclusion of arts and culture and adult literacy in the education system and art libraries can help promote this Government initiative by distributing their resources widely. The Library of the South African National Gallery is playing an unusual and non-traditional role in helping redress past inequities. It uses visual art, with its concern with expression and communication, to encourage adult learning and stimulate articulacy by encouraging learners to ‘read’ texts from the mass media and visual artworks in order to develop skills in all kinds of literacy. SANG’s project shows how language and artworks can be linked together productively, contributing to the basic education and training of adults.

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.

Depuis 1994, une grande partie des collections du Musée des Tissus de Lyon est accessible sur ordinateur. La Banque d’Images Textile propose, sur le site du Musée, des consultations écran, des impressions et des réservations pour les professionnels qui désirent exploiter un tissu faisant partie des collections. De la sorte les originaux sont préservés des manipulations trop fréquentes, et l’inventaire est informatisé, ce qui améliore grandement la connaissance des fonds.

The Royal Library, Copenhagen has made many attempts over the years to organise the huge collection of photographs held in its Department of Maps, Prints and Photographs into a formal museum of photography. Finally in 1996 the Royal Library created such a museum, and named it ‘The National Museum of Photography’. This museum within a library will be located in the new building at the City’s harbour front called The Black Diamond. The displays will show new as well as older photography from the collection, which is important both artistically and historically. Digitisation and cataloguing of the collection are under way, and the first couple of thousand items are already available to a wider public on the Internet.

The Axis database is the only national information resource on British artists and craftmakers. It contains visual-text data on over 2,500 contemporary British practitioners and is a rapidly growing source of data for researchers, students, curators, commissioning agents, architects, planners and patrons and purchasers of visual arts. Axis also has an important national role in promoting contemporary art and artists and widening access to visual culture.

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.

DutchESS (Dutch Electronic Subject Service, formerly NBW) is an Internet guide for the academic community produced by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the national library of the Netherlands) in co-operation with a number of Dutch academic libraries. The resources are selected by subject specialists who evaluate Internet information according to academic quality standards and make selections relevant to their own specific user groups. DutchESS has (as yet) no geographical restrictions, although it aims to cover Dutch resources as completely as possible. The service includes all disciplines, but the content depends on the contributions of individual subject specialists as well as on the bias of the participating libraries. A large number of art sites can now be found on the Internet, but many of them are superficial, lack substantial informative content, and/or are not relevant for academic research. Only a relatively small number meet the quality criteria of DutchESS and have been added to the database so far. Future developments of DutchESS may include participation in a European network of subject-based Information Gateways.

La Direction du Patrimoine, qui relève du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, a pour missions ‘de conserver, de protéger et de mettre en valeur le patrimoine national de la France’, le patrimoine étant entendu comme le bien reçu des générations qui nous ont précédés et que nous avons la volonté de transmettre aux suivantes.

Le mouvement de déconcentration mis en oeuvre par l’administration française a eu pour effet de confier la prise en charge opérationnelle de ces missions aux Directions régionales des Affaires culturelles (DRAC). Ainsi, dans les 26 régions de France, chaque DRAC compte en principe en son sein quatre services régionaux du patrimoine: respectivement, de l’Archéologie, des Monuments historiques, de l’Ethnologie et de l’Inventaire, la Direction centrale assumant le rôle de définir la politique générale, d’impulser les actions et de les coordonner, enfin de les évaluer.

Le public des bibliothèques d’art est très largement un public étudiant et cela oriente forcément la politique documentaire de celles-ci. Sans renier ce rôle, ces bibliothèques devraient se soucier davantage des liens qu’elles devraient entretenir avec les artistes en activité. Ceci passe par une offre documentaire adaptée et des services, notamment autour de l’actualité de la vie artistique internationale, et demande des compétences particulières.

What is library co-operation, what is its current relevance and how is its nature and purpose changing in today’s information world? What are the particular types of co-operative activity that art librarians have taken part in, and what have been their successes and failures? This article examines a range of projects carried out by ARLIS/UK & Ireland and others, from directories and union lists to cataloguing and indexing and disposal of stock. It considers the relationship between cooperative initiatives which can best be undertaken at local level and those where a national strategy and infrastructure are necessary. Finally it draws practical and realistic conclusions from a combination of past experience and a little crystal ball gazing.

Can museums and libraries profit from sharing their information, visual or textual? Is direct access to digital archives a more logical or economic way to develop access to images for teaching and research than assembling local collections? Recent digital image library projects in the United States, and their impact on the teaching practices of art and architectural historians, show the advantages of focusing on issues such as licensing and intellectual property, metadata and evolving cataloging practice, image quality, and the different costs of creation and delivery. But there are other potential benefits such as document delivery and the dissemination of archival information, as well as the preservation of fragile illustrated texts through digital imaging.

In 1997 the German art libraries magazine, AKMB-news: Informationen zu Kunst, Museum und Bibliothek, began a series of collaborations with contemporary artists, who provide original visual or conceptual contributions for some issues of the journal. The artists’ work refers mostly to the context of museums and libraries.

The Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) is one of the largest art documentation centres in the world. It maintains collections of millions of reproductions and press clippings, as well as housing a sizeable library of approximately 400,000 books. In the past decade the RKD has begun setting up various automated systems for the management of these collections. The major systems in operation are the automated library with some 30,000 records online and accessible for visitors, a database with bio- and bibliographical information on artists, and the recently initiated image database. Plans for the future include in-house and web access to all databases, continued improvement and expansion of the systems, retrospective conversion of parts of the collections and publication of CD-ROMs.

Founded in the fifteenth century, the French national library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, is one of the oldest research libraries, and, as regards the size and variety of its holdings, one of the largest in the world. An on-going programme of modernisation based on a new strategy was initiated in 1988, the aims of which are to enforce collection development in a broader encyclopaedic sense, facilitate access to documents for the general public and researchers, allow remote access through new technology and develop scientific and technical networks in co-operation with national institutions and the international community. From 1992 to 1995, two new buildings were created: one very large library (3,700 seats) located on the east side of Paris at Tolbiac, the François Mitterand Library, will house the 10 million books of the heritage collection and audiovisual documents; another new building, for conservation workshops, scientific laboratories, and new stores, the Centre Technique du Livre, is located on the outskirts of Paris, at Marne-la-Vallée. After the major book removal operation planned for 1998, the historic building in the rue de Richelieu will be devoted to special collections and will also house INHA, the new national institute for art history.

In 1996, the first workshops at Marne-la-Vallée became operational and the general public level of the François Mitterand Library was inaugurated. The research level will follow in October 1998. Implementation of stage three of the audiovisual system, the new information system, will also begin in 1998, the year in which it is foreseen in addition that the new French union catalogue and the digital library will be made available to the public. All these projects aim at improving and enlarging the information services provided both to the general public and the scientific community.