The ABBA (Asociación de Bibliotecarios y Bibliotecas de Arquitectura, Construcción y Urbanismo) brings together about 50 librarians and 40 libraries of quite different types. There are university libraries, government libraries, and the libraries of associations of architects; there are large libraries with extensive resources, and small libraries with very small budgets. The only thing they have in common is their speciality (architecture, building and town and country planning) and the kind of user they serve (architects and architecture students.

Funding opportunities and digitisation initiatives offer libraries, galleries and museums the potential to exploit their image collections – photographs, slides, drawings, pictures and works of art – in new and exciting ways. Many different organisations are involved in developing standards for the formal description of images (e.g. artist, title, photographer) and some effort is being made to develop compatible standards for the digital environment. Indexing of images can be a difficult task because images are rich in information and may be used by widely different groups of users, who may not always express their information needs adequately. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technology, which allows the retrieval of images based on similarity to a query image, has enormous potential, particularly if it can be combined with text-based indexing.

This paper evaluates the access provided to electronic reference material in art libraries in Germany and elsewhere. The extremely heterogenous state of education and knowledge concerning these materials is discussed, both from the point of view of library staff and that of the specialised public. Finally a proposal is formulated for a co-operative way of giving access to at least the metadata of these resources, and for their thematic indexing.

Trade cards and other trade resources in the John Johnson Collection form the theme of the forthcoming Bodleian exhibition (October 1st to Christmas 2001). In parallel with this, the trade cards have been catalogued and digitised. After a brief introduction to the John Johnson Collection and existing finding aids, this article discusses the usefulness of trade cards as a resource and the multiple access points provided by detailed cataloguing, which enable us to establish new correlations between trades.

Trade literature can be used as primary source material for the study of subjects ranging from business history to the history of advertising. Historical collections of trade literature exist in museum, academic and special libraries in the UK and in the United States. Collections of current trade literature are also being developed as important resources for users by an increasing number of academic libraries supporting design- or construction-related courses. Many such collections however remain uncatalogued, or only appear in in-house manual catalogues and are therefore largely inaccessible. This ephemeral material appears in a wide variety of formats and media, and can present particular difficulties in terms of organisation and documentation. The ARLIS/UK & Ireland Cataloguing and Classification Committee is currently working on guidelines to help libraries address these problems and encourage the online cataloguing of trade literature collections.

The main aims of the Museo imaginado project are to create a virtual museum of Spanish paintings held outside Spain, and a virtual special documentation centre on this topic, as a focus for other studies and research tools. Most of the important museums in the world contain masterpieces by Spanish painters and our target is to collect them together in a database which records their history, their provenance and the travels and trials they have undergone before arriving at their present destination. Today, the meeting up of technological skills and art history research has made it possible for us to make this information available to the public and to the academic world.

Successor to Thieme-Becker and Vollmer, those great standard reference works for art history, the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon is an even more ambitious undertaking which will eventually include entries for between 450,000 and 500,000 artists. The data will be published in a number of ways: in book format (including a couple of spin-off versions in hard copy), CD-ROM and, increasingly, online. This article describes the developments one AKL editor has witnessed in the production process for the projected 80 volumes of the complete work, and outlines its role as an authority for artists’ names.

Electronic retrieval of information is only one of the many aspects of librarianship seen by delegates on the recent ARLIS/UK & Ireland study tour of art libraries in Germany. Diverse in their history and development, these are today being drawn together into a supportive web of co-operation through technological innovation and professional partnerships.

In a Herculean effort to distribute information about art collections on a previously unknown scale, museums, arts organizations, libraries, and archives have been hard at work developing standards and implementing testbed projects, large-scale union databases which integrate and disseminate information. Two such projects are ‘Conceptual and Intermedia Online’ (CIAO) and ‘Museums and the Online Archive of California’ (MOAC), both using the Encoded Archival Description to describe and provide access to art and other cultural collections. But what is the future of such collaborations and the content portals they spawn? Will they be able to scale up to include hundreds or thousands of institutions, using current models? What are the limitations for such consortia? What are the limitations for participating institutions? Several options appear on the horizon, and one simple need suggests looking to decentralization, and back to the individual institution, for the solution to sharing art and cultural content on a truly vast scale.

Although somewhat concealed amongst the lakes and forests of Sorø, the Danish Museological Library has already been in existence for a quarter of a century, and is one of the very few libraries on museology in Europe. There is an increasing interest in the subject both in Denmark and in other countries which have had museums for centuries, where the concepts of the museum and museology are under active discussion and museological education is becoming more widely available.

Every museum generates a considerable amount of printed and graphic ephemeral material, which provides first-hand information on its permanent exhibitions and temporary activities. These can be exhibition brochures, didactic material, activity announcements, cards, etc. and they are frequently the only source of direct information on the active life of the organisation which precisely reflects its public image. However, few museums are devoting effort to preserving this material, whose retention is not always guaranteed. This paper aims to establish a classification of the different types of ephemeral publications common in museums (informative, educational, commercial, of internal use, etc). It sets forth an elementary system for dealing with them which, by using the MARC format (in those libraries using a standardised system) or a database in ACCESS (for those lacking one), should result in the establishment of a secure system for storage, retrieval and diffusion of this data.

Artists in Canada is a bilingual union list of documentation files on Canadian artists held by the National Gallery of Canada Library, and by 22 libraries and art galleries across the country. More than 42,700 artists are represented, with biographical information as well as locations for files. Originally compiled manually, Artists in Canada has been automated since the late 1970s and, as well as appearing in print format, has been accessible internationally on the World Wide Web since 1995.

This report is the result of the author spending three months as a visiting scholar at Nanjing Arts Institute in the People’s Republic of China. The first section was published in the Art Libraries Journal vol. 25 no. 4 2000 and gave general background information about a number of art libraries in China, their collections, and the resources available for acquisitions and staffing. In this concluding part the author documents the cataloguing and classification systems being used by the same libraries, their computer applications and networking, the public services they offer, and their physical layout.