The world of art publishing is often characterized by hefty exhibition catalogues and glossy artist monographs that aim to be comprehensive documentation of a theme or an artist’s output, but also cost more than pocket money to purchase. As art librarians we purchase, move, and sometimes read them every day. Occasionally a publication will catch your attention, maybe because it appears ephemeral, or perhaps because it more closely resembles books that you might accession into an artists’ books or artists’ publications collection. Occasional Papers publications have that look and yet their content points to a wider audience. Their philosophy of the cheap paperback makes them unusual in mainstream art publishing. How does a small publisher survive? Clearly by disregarding just about everything the publishing textbooks say. Occasional Papers has found its niche and sat down to tell us about it.

How is artistic research and practice output within academia to be quality assessed and made available open access on the internet? Is it possible to integrate artistic research within a framework of bibliometrics, to allocate research funding at an institution? At the University of Gothenburg, a model for addressing these questions has been implemented at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, through close collaboration between faculty representatives and the University library. The institutional repository of the university now holds a growing collection of openly available output from artistic research and practice.

Museums have seen the universality of Wikipedia use and have started to open up their data to re-use on the Internet. This is an effort both to improve the information available to casual users and researchers and to make images and information from their holdings more accessible. In a paper originally delivered at the IFLA Art Libraries Section pre-conference in August 2014, Sylvain Machefert, a university systems librarian, describes some of his activities as a member of Wikimédia France. A project between the Centre Pompidou and Wikimédia designed to involve the art-loving public, as well as those with more expert art experience, serves as a case study. He assesses the project’s strengths and weaknesses on the basis of its outcomes. He touches on some other projects that have also contributed to the improvement of art information available through one of France’s and the world’s most popular general web services.

This article discusses the rationale and decision making processes involved in the construction of barryflanagan.com, the website developed by the Estate of the British artist to give access to an online catalogue raisonné of his work alongside a digitised archive. A central focus to the project was to develop a systematic representation of interconnectivity: from notation and documentation to realisation and subsequent exhibition.

As project manager of the Art Discovery Group Catalogue project, and on behalf of the artlibraries.net committee, Geert-Jan Koot explains the development of the Art Discovery Group Catalogue. This discovery service powered by WorldCat is a new, separate project developed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in Europe for art libraries, which became officially available on May 1st 2014. The project has been accepted within the international Future of Art Bibliography (FAB) initiative of the Getty Research Institute as its bibliographic component. The fact that the system is being developed in Europe provides an excellent equilibrium between Europe and America within the project. Following the invitation to participate, over 80 libraries have so far expressed interest, of which 60 have joined the catalogue. This project is a major step in one of the FAB goals of making art bibliographical information available worldwide through collaboration.

In 2011 the Courtauld Institute of Art was awarded funding for two new MA subjects looking to Asian art, in addition to its strengths studying art produced in the western tradition. The library was called on to build its collection around the new subjects to support the students in their studies. What selections tools and strategies have been used and what problems has the library encountered along the way? The new subjects are outlined and the library’s approach is discussed. Lessons were learned from the past and the library is about to embark in a new phase in its collecting history.

Although there is a lot of digitised cultural heritage content online, it is still incredibly difficult to source good material to reuse, or material that you are allowed to reuse, in creative projects. What can institutions do to help people who want to invest their time in making and creating using digitised historical items as inspiration and source material?

This paper presents findings from interviews conducted with editors of catalogue raisonné projects in various stages of development combined with the author’s work on the Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings of Jasper Johns. A summary is presented of the common mission and challenges in preparing the catalogue raisonné as well as the considerations for, and benefits of, publishing online. The result is a concise reference tool of best practices and suggestions for future catalogues raisonnés and online catalogue projects, including features available if publishing online; staff recommendations; workflow; database options; data migration; research; storage of research assets; and long-term maintenance.

There has been a dramatic shift in publication of scholarly art research materials from print to digital formats. In late 2013, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) was awarded a two-year grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address challenges of preservation and continued access for future researchers of these materials by implementing a web archiving programme. Due to the transition of many catalogues raisonnés to online from print, born-digital catalogues raisonnés are one of the five key collecting areas of focus for NYARC’s project. The intention of this article is to provide an introduction to the key components of the implementation of NYARC’s web archiving programme, to explore the far-flung implications of the digital shift, and to demonstrate the need for a community of collaboration in building curated web archive collections to benefit the future art historian.

What is a page in the digital age? The Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) was launched in 2009 to create new models for the publication of museum collection catalogues in the online environment. Five years later, all eight museums participating in the grant programme have published pioneering online catalogues. A final report on the initiative, which will share lessons learned and remaining challenges, as well as core information of value for any museum considering online publishing, will be presented by the Foundation later this year.