Although art librarians began to join together in North America in the 1920s, they did so in two distinct strands — museum librarians and public librarians. Art librarians of all kinds, including, significantly, art librarians in higher education, formed national associations from the late 1960s, and almost immediately began to establish the international links which culminated in the coming into being of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries. International cooperation, including networking of resources, is helping art libraries to serve users worldwide. Art librarianship is now so well established as an international enterprise that it can afford to admit other arts information professionals; nonetheless it needs to continue to work towards becoming a genuinely multi-cultural professional community which does not privilege any country, region, language, culture, gender, or point of view.

The Centre for Newfoundland Studies, a division of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Libraries, has as its mandate to collect all material possible on all aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Centre’s collections of both published and manuscript materials will be of interest to researchers of the art and architecture of Newfoundland. While the Centre is primarily a reference collection, information services are provided to remote researchers. Researchers may wish to access the Centre’s catalogues and bibliographic tools, including its own Newfoundland periodical article bibliography, from the Centre’s web site.

Art libraries in Denmark mostly fall into one of two categories: art departments’ in public libraries, and research libraries attached to colleges, universities, and museums. Librarians in research libraries are in many cases scholars in their own right, while library staff at the Kunstakademiets Bibliotek are responsible for the Bibliografi over dansk kunst (sadly not published since 1981) and for Danish contributions to the BHA. The Royal Library and some art libraries hold collections of visual resources and of archival materials; in addition, there is an autonomous national archive of Danish artists, Weilbachs arkiv. An art librarians’ section of Bibliotekarforbundet (the Union of Danish Librarians), Kunstfaggruppen, was initiated by art librarians in public libraries, but is open to other art librarians too; Danish art librarians also work together within ARLIS/Norden. Professional training in Denmark is largely confined to general librarianship; art librarians in public libraries tend to be trained librarians with a personal enthusiasm for art, whereas librarians in research libraries are in some cases graduates but are not necessarily trained librarians. While the public library system took advantage of standardization, automation, and networking, the research libraries could not so readily embrace change, but two recent initiatives are beginning to bring libraries of all kinds together — DanBib, the Danish online union catalogue, formed in 1995 by merging the two separate databases for public and research libraries which both originated in the 1980s, and Kulturnet Danmark, a government-sponsored scheme involving the Internet.

The Reference Library of the Chinese Academy of Arts (RLCAA) has identified the maintenance and development of its rich collections as its primary objective, which it pursues not merely by acquiring published materials but also, for example, by making recordings of musical and dramatic performances. But also, the RLCAA is committed to promoting and facilitating the use of its collections, and is consciously moving away from a passive custodial role to the active provision of services to users. In order to serve their users better, libraries must end their isolation and join together in networks; a new building at the Chinese Academy of Arts is to become the national centre for art information and library services, and this development also challenges the Academy to co-ordinate its several resource centres more effectively. Staff at the RLCAA have already created an art thesaurus, and are currently working on a bibliography of Chinese artists which it is hoped will be the first of several online databases covering different branches of the arts in China.

Literature on folk art of the Atlantic region, with few exceptions, would be nonexistent without the intervention of visual arts institutions and museums. The interest in folk art and folk art collecting by museums and galleries, and the institutions’ penchant for documentation, has generated a diversity of written and visual material on the subject, of both an historical and a contemporary nature, which unveils a regional portrait of artists and their work.

The 1964 Danish Public Libraries Act empowered public libraries to lend materials other than books. Subsequently a number of libraries took advantage of this to initiate loan collections of original works of art, posters, and slides, alongside and as an extension of the provision of art books and journals. In addition, art departments in public libraries began to organise exhibitions of contemporary art. In some cases, including Gladsaxe, Lyngby, and Gentofte in Greater Copenhagen, distinct art libraries were created. Artists whose work is represented in libraries can benefit from payments dispensed through the Public Lending Right scheme. Librarians responsible for art departments in public libraries formed a group within the Danish Librarians’ Union, in the 1970s. The activities of art departments have suffered during the difficult economic climate of the last decade or so, but membership of Kunstfaggruppen is now growing again.

London is a major international centre for study of and research into Chinese art. Four libraries - the British Library, the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the library of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum - are perhaps the main providers of information on Chinese art, although information is also available from several museum libraries, from the library of Christie’s auction house, and from public and other libraries. A survey of users of information on Chinese art indicates that provision is generally satisfactory, although the degree of user satisfaction varies from one library to another. More effective networking between the key libraries would bring about significant improvements.

Since the inception of ARLIS/ANZ, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly seen themselves as part of the Asia-Pacific region rather than as a distant outpost of Britain. The impact of post-War European immigrants from countries other than Britain has been felt and immigration from the Asia-Pacific region is now equally important. These developments have contributed to a confident, diverse culture, within which indigenous art has gained greater recognition. Art librarians are benefiting from worldwide electronic communications which have equally helped overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ within the region itself. Thus, ARLISANZ-L now complements ARLIS/ANZ News. Because of the vast distance between members, ARLIS/ANZ bases its entire central executive within a single local chapter for two years at a time. Local chapters are flourishing, most particularly around major centres. Dispersal of members is also overcome by the all-important annual conferences and workshops. Like other ARLIS groups, ARLIS/ANZ engages in advocacy on behalf of art libraries and art librarians. A major concern for ARLIS/ANZ remains the documentation of the art of Australia and New Zealand both as a result of scholarship and publishing from within the region, and in major international bibliographies and indexes.

While copper-printing can be traced back to the Yuan Dynasty in China, the art of copper-engraving was introduced by the Italian missionary, Matteo Ripa, in 1711. The first work to be printed with this new technique was Illustrations of 36 Vista ofthejehol Palace (1712). The Qianlong emperor wanted pictures of his military campaigns in Eastern Turkestan engraved on copper, and so he arranged for a series of sixteen engravings to be executed in Europe. Following the success of this initiative, pictures of his subsequent military exploits were engraved on copper by Chinese artists. Thus, while the West learned a great deal from China about paper and printing, copper-engraving is a technique which China acquired from the West in spite of a supposed lack of interest in the West.

ARLIS/Norden was founded in 1986 to bring together art libraries and art librarians of all kinds in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The association has maintained close links with the IFLA Section of Art Libraries, and it hosted the Section’s meetings at Stockholm in 1989. ARLIS/Norden has received guests from other countries, while Nordic colleagues have participated in events in other countries. Its own annual meetings are the key events in ARLIS/Norden’s own programme.

In over three-quarters of a century since Harry Piers read his paper ‘Artists in Nova Scotia’ before the Nova Scotia Historical Society, there has been no comprehensive publication about the history of art in Nova Scotia. An unpublished typescript does exist, however, written by Donald Cameron Mackay in the 1970s. This text is being developed for publication to make it available for study and to serve as groundwork for further research.

Whatever their format, reproductions provide illusory experiences of art, but may count as ‘authentic’ if adequate to their purpose and the technical possibilities and expectations of their time. A reproduction seizes the original at one moment in its history, a fact that should be made clear in its captioning. Engraved and other graphic reproductions, being hand-made, were always subjective and idealising. The camera brought greater objectivity, but even modern colour photographs interpret and mislead. The digital image offers still greater potential for exact realisation of, and access to, works of art, but its ease of manipulation increases the risk of falsification. Reproductions also have a psychological existence as mental constructs. Art and its institutions depend on them, and allow them to create their own authenticity.

From the point of view of a student of art history in the 1980s re-entering the discipline as a graduate student, the ‘new’ art history represents a dramatically wider field of enquiry involving new methodologies, although ‘old’ art history is still pursued by some academics. The ‘new’ art history employs an interdisciplinary approach which embraces materials far beyond ‘traditional’ art historical sources, and so information has to be sought outside the art library and via the Internet. Librarians responsible for supporting art history studies need to keep in touch with teachers, with curriculum developments, and with the discipline itself; it may also be helpful to get involved in staff/student use of the Web, and to collaborate with other Humanities librarians. The way in which the ‘new’ art history branches out in all directions parallels the hypertext linkages of the Web and the complexity of our globally-connected world.

‘A historical dictionary of artists in Atlantic Canada’ is the first attempt to systematically develop the contours of four hundred years of visual arts in Atlantic Canada since the hegemony of Western European civilization. The project entails the development of a data base of biographical and professional information on artists born prior to 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War who were active in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada — New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The definition of ‘artist’ has been as broadly defined as possible to include craft persons, photographers, architects nor has there been an attempt to limit the definitions to ‘professionals’. The data is stored in a ‘FileMaker Pro’ programme using a Macintosh computer.

The Smithsonian Institution, a trust instrumentality of the United States, and the largest museum and research complex in the world, receives many outside permission requests to reproduce images in the Smithsonian Collections. Charging fees for photographic usage is a common practice in the United States, especially in art history and general museums. Beginning in 1992, the Smithonian established internal guidelines for changing such fees and for handling permission requests from outside sources. The procedures ensure that the Smithsonian recognises and respects the intellectual property rights associated with images in the collections and the terms of any pre-existing agreements. Great care is also taken to protect the Smithsonian’s name from use in any commercial context, to avoid the implication that the Institution endorses a product (or one product rather than another).