This article provides practical first steps and basic resources for tracing copyright owners in archives and special libraries, through a compilation of sources, guidance notes and useful practices. It points out online diagnostic tools and suggests how to find copyright holders through different search streams, when those holders are known, and where the institution holding the work in question is based in the UK.

The establishment of the national image repository hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) at the University for the Creative Arts was an early pioneering effort in the 1990s to provide shared online access and preservation for digitised visual arts collections. Over the 15 years since the VADS image repository was first launched, and as the internet has rapidly expanded and transformed, the VADS team has also sought project funding to explore and address new themes and issues that have emerged within the arts education sector. Three of these recent collaborative endeavours are detailed in this article: the Kultur II Group which is supporting the development of institutional repositories in the arts; the Spot the Difference project which is researching the emergence and extent of a perceived ‘copy and paste’ culture; and the Look-Here! project, which has worked with ten partners to foster digitisation skills and strategies in the arts.

The existence of the Franz Mayer Museum is due to the German philanthropist and naturalized Mexican, Franz Gabriel Mayer Traumann Altschul (1882-1975), who bequeathed to the Mexican people his library and decorative arts collection. Considered the most important of its kind in the country, it includes works from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from America, Europe and Asia. It is located in Mexico City, in a building dating from the second half of the 16th century, and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011. The Library, which is open to researchers, is currently made up of around 22,000 volumes, and specializes in decorative arts and the history of Mexico in the 19th century, among other subjects. As well as displaying the Mayer Collection the Museum also presents temporary exhibitions on decorative arts, contemporary design and photography, while the library holds two exhibitions a year highlighting the bibliographic collections.

The Frances L. Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design has served the needs of the teaching faculty and students of the University, and of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning design scholars worldwide, since the beginning of the architecture program in 1900. During that period the library has had two different homes, and the collections have grown through a combination of purchased acquisitions and gifts from faculty and alumni of the School. The library has been an integral part of the School throughout its history, working closely with faculty and students to support design education.

The number of North American art museums with a presence on the internet has more than doubled since 1999. This is not surprising given the power of new media to transform the experiences that museum visitors have with our cultural institutions. Every year museums attract thousands of visitors to view, both in person and online, their specialized collections and unique exhibitions. Developing in tandem with these resources and largely unfamiliar to the general, museum-going public, the libraries and archives of these institutions have contributed to the research mission, educational programming, documentary history, and curatorial functions of museums in countless ways. In addition, especially for art historians and other scholars, museum libraries and archives have been and continue to be increasingly valuable for primary and secondary sources, including artists’ correspondence, diaries, sketches, hard-to-find monographs, exhibition records and sales catalogues. What is unclear, however, is the extent to which resources in art museum libraries and archives are being documented, preserved and made accessible online. This research is perhaps the first of its kind to evaluate, on a small scale and during a span of twelve years, the web presence of 22 North American art museum libraries and archives.

Is there such thing as a ‘typical’ career path for art librarians? This article presents the results of a survey of art librarians’ motivations for selecting the profession, and also their educational backgrounds, current employment and professional experiences, and presents advice for graduate students and prospective librarians. A questionnaire was sent to six email discussion groups related to art librarianship, from which 280 responses were received from across the world. The results indicate that art librarians typically work in academic settings, chose the field of art librarianship while already employed in libraries, have an educational background in the arts at the undergraduate and/or graduate level, and selected librarianship primarily because they were attracted to the duties and work settings of the job. This study includes advice from current librarians for graduate students seeking employment as art librarians in today’s challenging job market.

This article provides an introduction to the use of the Creative Commons licence system, and sets it in a historical, economic and political context. It is written from the perspective of involvement in open educational projects in an arts university that has used the licences. A description of the fundamental features of the licences and their uses is given, together with an outline of how the Creative Commons organisation works and its strategic aims. An assessment of the usefulness of these licences is provided, together with a description of the challenges faced in dealing with low levels of legal awareness amongst academics. Practical advice and sources of further information and guidance are offered to help readers implement the licences locally.

The São Paulo Museum of Art is one of the most important art museums in Brazil. This paper presents the experience of its Library in structuring and making two databases available on the internet – the online catalogue and the controlled vocabulary of arts and authorities catalogue – and the results of a first analysis of the transaction log files of these databases.

Librarians at Columbia’s Avery Library, New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and the Research Division of the New York Public Library are working together to offer a two-day symposium directed towards bibliographic resources for the study of Latin American art in New York City. The symposium, Latin American art bibliography: a continuing conversation, will celebrate the collections of these three institutions, placing them within the context of the field and the larger bibliographic and library landscapes. Supported in part by the Humanities Initiative at NYU and the Institute on the Study of Latin American Art the symposium will feature papers and talks, as well as tours of local landmarks.

With the construction of the Rijksmuseum by Cuypers in 1885, the art museum acquired its first rooms solely dedicated as a reference library. This was a direct consequence of the growing demand for scientific libraries in the 19th century. In contrast to established concepts of that time, the room for the books – usually a rather plain stack room – was sumptuously decorated. This expresses the idea that arts and knowledge should be regarded as one unity.

Art information increasingly operates in a global environment, but does not have the benefit of a lingua franca which some other disciplines enjoy. Art information continues to be generated in a variety of vernacular languages, which limits cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Easy access to cheap, instantaneous and accurate translation would be the ideal but this is unlikely in the foreseeable future. A selection of online initiatives and tools is assessed in this article in an attempt to identify potential trends and opportunities.

David Sutton was one of the founders of the WATCH project (Writers Artists & Their Copyright Holders) in 1994. In this article he outlines the historical background to why the project was needed, before telling the story of how WATCH developed. WATCH is now the principal source of information about copyright holders anywhere in the world, and it has expanded its remit to include artists as well as literary and other authors.