The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Renier Collection of Children’s Books provides a rich resource for research into book production as well as social history. Publishers’ cloth bindings have developed in a visually vibrant way that provides clues to the production dates of the books, as well as encouraging reflections on how they were marketed across the Victorian era and early 20th century. Questions also arise, such as, what was the relationship between the reader and cover? How did the cover designs reflect the times in which they were created? And, how different are our paperback era designs to those of the period when cloth was used?

Network has become a much used term in modernist studies, but what is a network and what does it tell us about a periodical? A network is a series of connections, the study of which reveals not only the modes of production, readership and social and political niches of journals, but also the constituent elements of their aesthetic discourse. This article explores the biographical, commercial and institutional connections of three periodicals at the beginning of the 20th century – the Art Journal, Connoisseur and Burlington Magazine – within the year 1903. Their different approaches to art historical analysis are also examined, not as abstract philosophies unbounded by constraints of time or context, but interpreted as texts originating from a specific and shifting history, in which the relationship with the art market emerges as crucial.

The term ‘livres d’artistes’ hides from view creative artworks, whose presence in special library collections is justified by their artistic and literary value but also by their value as witness of their times. After defining the content of these collections, this article analyses the way ‘livres d’artistes’ are managed. Because they are different from all other books, they struggle to find their public. Active promotion is thus an essential step in making them properly influential.

The Tate Library holds an extensive collection of print ephemera that includes private invitation cards, press releases, postcards, and promotional material from artists and galleries. In 2006, library staff began to notice a trend for an increasing amount of born-digital ephemera, circulated via email and vulnerable to loss, deletion and disintegration. In 2011, they undertook an internal research project to develop a strategy for collecting, storing and providing access to born-digital ephemera. As the creation and dissemination of electronic ephemera continues to grow rapidly, we need to ask how we can bridge the gap in our technical knowledge and apply current digital preservation research to our library collections. How can we establish a low-cost working best practice for collection, storage and access? And is there future potential to create external partnerships with other institutions facing the same issues?

Modern and contemporary books, easily replaceable in the internet age, are weeded from collections and disposed of because of their poor quality materials and construction. For an art library, where obsolescence is rarely an issue, the 20th- and 21st-century book can be a problem. Rare and seminal works in our collections are crumbling because they are acidic or perhaps they just cannot withstand the handling (and photocopying). We have become alert to the conservation of books from the hand-press period, but do not always know what to do with recent publications, or we cannot afford to undertake the measures necessary. As the artist’s book as an art form reaches its 50th birthday, we highlight the conservation of one such volume, in hopes of opening up discussion about the care of our contemporary treasures.

Princeton University’s Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology is one of the oldest and most extensive art libraries in America. Founder and namesake Allan Marquand was both an art historian and the creator of a ‘logical machine’ that prefigured modern computers. This shared science and humanities heritage is echoed in the Blue Mountain Project, a new digital humanities initiative to which Marquand Library is a major contributor. This article begins with a brief description of the library’s origins and the development of its facilities and collections. It then reports on Blue Mountain, a digital library of the avant-garde that chronicles the emergence of modernity in the literary, visual and performing arts from 1848 to 1923.

From 1993 onwards a number of plans have been made to create an extension of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. City politics, changing views on what kind of a museum the Stedelijk wants to be, and budgetary problems were the reasons two consecutive plans, one by Robert Venturi, the other by Alvaro Siza, were not realised. Finally the Dutch firm Benthem Crouwel designed a new wing, doubling the space of the Museum. In this building, known as ‘The Bathtub’, the library has been given a prominent place.

In situations characterised by complex and ambiguous economic conditions, it becomes necessary to structure organisations in ways that will meet the challenges. This paper introduces the innovative strategic plan currently being implemented at the Centro de Documentación y Biblioteca del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. This is still in its early stages, but a contrast can already be drawn with the status quo five years ago when, despite being involved in various initiatives, the Library had no strategy of its own and no established reputation for contemporary art research.