The Hazen Center is a state-of-the-art electronic resource center situated within the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It provides access to art historical research and other scholarly resources available via electronic media such as CD-ROMs and the Internet, and also serves as a teaching center for their use. The Center is used by the Museum’s staff, the academic community, and by visiting art researchers.

Les Archives de la critique d’art sont une bibliothèque et un centre de recherche spécialisés en art contemporain et en critique et théorie de l’art. Elles se sont donné pour but de réunir les documents et les publications de tous ceux qui écrivent sur l’art contemporain.

Unique en son genre, cette institution créée en 1989 a une envergure internationale aussi bien par son fonds (écrits et archives) que par ses actions: développement de bases de données et d’un site Internet, organisation de conférences et de colloques. Son originalité consiste dans l’implication des critiques d’art dans son fonctionnement même. Par l’apport de leurs documents, écrits et/ou documentation personnelle, les critiques constituent la majeure partie des collections de la bibliothèque.

Recently it has become possible to get access, on the Internet, to a number of important items in CADENS, a work-in-progress project which is analysing the contents of all Dutch nineteenth-century exhibition catalogues of contemporary visual arts. As well as detailed information about the exhibition catalogues, a chronological compilation is available for each artist’s exhibits. In future it will also be possible, using keywords, to search the titles of the exhibits online.

It is surprising, in view of the international interest in Scandinavian design, to find that studying this subject on a scholarly level is not at all widespread in the Nordic countries. To increase the amount of research in this field scholars need to be able to publish and get feedback, both from editors and translators and from colleagues. Awareness of this need led to the founding of the annual Scandinavian Journal of Design History seven years ago, which publishes scholarly articles in English, written by Nordic scholars on all topics, and by those abroad on Scandinavian Design. The author’s work on this journal has been complemented by her role as Librarian of the Danish Museum of Decorative Art, which for the last 100 years has been responsible for collecting and preserving Danish decorative art and design documentation. During the last 10 to 15 years the development of design and of design history has brought about a re-evaluation of the criteria for information retrieval. And this has also focussed attention on the problem of proper terminology in this relatively new field – in Danish, but also in other Scandinavian languages – and on the search for exact equivalents in English.

This survey of the achievements of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and its Art and Architecture Group shows the effectiveness of a collaborative approach in developing best practices and standards, and implementing new methodologies and technologies, to benefit the international art library and research communities. RLG members in Europe, North America and Australia include many of the major art research libraries. RLG offers services such as the RLIN bibliographic database and the MARCADIA retrospective conversion service in conjunction with projects documenting sales catalogue records (SCIPIO), preserving serials (the Art Serials Preservation Project) and facilitating the interloan of material between members. More recently the partnership between the RLG and the Getty Information Institute has made available an enormous range of art documentation work carried out by the Getty: standards and authority control work such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artists’ Names and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names. In the 1980s the RLG conducted a survey identifying information needs in the humanities, which has led to resources such as the Bibliography of the History of Art becoming widely accessible, with the Provenance Index to follow shortly. This partnership is now active in the museum field, attempting to bridge the gap between the domains of secondary and primary materials in the field of art research. The REACH project (Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage) is experimenting with the export of existing machine-readable data from heterogeneous museum collection systems, and testing the feasibility of designing a common interface for access which will complement RLG’s other resources.

In Spring 1999 the Art Libraries Society/The Netherlands (OKBN) plans to organize a conference on ‘Book & Image: Visual Resources and Art Libraries’, to discuss various aspects of the whereabouts, accessibility and use of visual resources in art libraries and other collections of art historical documentation. By doing this we hope to increase awareness amongst art librarians and visual resource librarians of the necessity of communicating questions and sharing their experiences. In particular we need to find new ways of co-operating in order to meet the challenges posed by new technological developments and future users. A small working group of ARLIS-NL members, joined by some colleagues from slide libraries and visual archives, already meets bi-monthly for brainstorming sessions aimed at preparing an attractive and challenging program for this event.

Ouverte en 1977 au sein du Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, la Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) a été fondée selon trois principes: encyclopédisme, actualité et libre accès. Elle présente toutes ses collections multimédia en libre accès, à tout public, gratuitement et sans formalité, avec la possibilité de ‘se servir’ seul, de passer par le catalogue informatisé ou de s’adresser aux bibliothécaires présents dans des bureaux de renseignement spécialisés.

La Bpi connaît depuis 20 ans un incontestable succès: offrant 1800 places de lecture, elle reçoit plus de 10 000 personnes par jour, 6 jours sur 7 –jours fériés inclus – avec une amplitude d’ouverture de 10 à 12 heures par jour, la rançon de ce succès étant une fréquente file d’attente à l’entrée des espaces.

For six months between July and December 1997 Wilson Smith, a Faculty Librarian at Edinburgh College of Art, acted as Reader Services Librarian in the library of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI. Here he gives his impressions of the School and its ambience, and describes the library and its collections, along with the work he undertook there. An Appendix gives details of some of the other art libraries he visited in the United States.

La rénovation du Musée des Beaux-Arts est arrivée à terme au début de cette année, après 8 ans de travaux effectués par tranches successives. La bibliothèque faisait partie de la deuxième tranche, inaugurée fin 1993.

Située à l’entresol du bâtiment, côté administration, les locaux se répartissent de la façon suivante:

• • une salle de lecture de 90m2 (18 places de lecteurs), avec en libre accès les usuels, fichiers (manuels) et photocopieur

• • trois salles de magasins (90m2 au total, équipées de compactus) situées au même niveau (accès indirect), plus deux salles de magasins en sous-sol d’une superficie de 65 m2 (rayonnages classiques).

The BONAS database is the result of an initiative to gather and make easily accessible information about the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch architects and related professionals. It gives details of their lives and works and of a large number of their buildings from about 1790 to the present. An extensive bibliography is being compiled at the same time, and the data is being published in a series of volumes on individual practitioners.

The Delft University of Technology Library, the oldest technical library in the Netherlands, is the national focal point for collecting literature on the applied sciences and technology. A major part of this collection covers applied and visual arts, with works from the sixteenth and seventeenth century based on Vitruvius, others by Palladio, Serlio or Dutch architects like Hendrik de Keyser, and contextual material on architecture and the fine arts. The Treasury aims to be both a nationally and an internationally known collection of technological literature.

L’Association des Bibliothécaires Français est la plus ancienne association de bibliothécaires en France. Elle fut fondée en 1906 et reconnue d’utilité publique en 1969. Elle compte environ 3 800 adhérents répartis dans deux sections: Bibliothèques d’ étude et recherche et Bibliothèques publiques. Les bibliothèques d’art représentent une sous-section des bibliothèques d’étude et recherche au même titre que la BnF, les bibliothèques spécialisées, les bibliothèques universitaires, les bibliothèques de musique. Le dynamisme et la spécificité des bibliothèques d’art ont nécessité la constitution de cette ‘sous-section’.

Notre première réunion eut lieu à la bibliothèque de l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, le 16 novembre 1967, à l’initiative de 24 bibliothécaires d’art et historiens d’art. Grâce à la clairvoyance de tous ses membres et à l’enthousiasme de Suzanne Damiron, Jacqueline Viaux, Huguette Rouit, Denise Gazier, Geneviève Bonté, Annie Jacques, Catherine Schmitt, cette sous-section a affirmé sa personnalité. Elle est maintenant riche de plus de 130 membres. Nos thèmes de réflexion sont toujours d’actualité: coordination des acquisitions et des échanges, réalisation de répertoires, de catalogues collectifs, enrichissement de l’indexation, affinement des systèmes de classification, évaluation des ouvrages de référence, pédagogie de l’accueil des lecteurs.

As of the first of January 1997, Dutch museums have been able to hook up to the computerised service called Netwerk Collectie Nederland. The NCN is a closed network, an intranet on a subscription basis, meant for a limited group of professional users. It was created as a joint venture by several museum and governmental organisations and developed by the Instituut Collectie Nederland (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage). Its initial aim was to facilitate mobility of collections, i.e. the exchange of objects between collecting institutions in the Netherlands. The experience of the first operational year has shown that this focus is too narrow to enable the service to become financially self-supporting within four years, which is the goal. An intricate combination of push and pull factors of a political, technical and cultural nature has contributed to a disappointing take-up of the NCN by its intended users. New directions are currently being studied to improve this situation. As a case study, the story of the NCN can serve as an example of the complexity of such endeavours.