The PHAROS consortium of fourteen international art historical photo archives is digitizing the over 20 million images (with accompanying documentation) in its combined collections and has begun to construct a common access platform using Linked Open Data and the ResearchSpace software. In addition to resulting in a rich and substantial database of images for art-historical research, the PHAROS initiative supports the development of shared standards for mapping and sharing photo archive metadata, as well as for best practices for working with large digital image collections and conducting computational image analysis. Moreover, alongside their digitization efforts, PHAROS member institutions are considering the kinds of art-historical questions the resulting database of images could be used to research. This article indicates some of the prospective research directions stimulated by modern technologies, with the aim of exploring the epistemological potential of photographic archives and challenging the boundaries between the analogue and the digital.

ARt Image Exploration Space (ARIES) is a free, cloud-based dynamic environment offering art historians and others an extensive array of practical tools for analysing images. It is the product of a successful collaboration between art historians, librarians, computer scientists, and engineers from the Frick Art Reference Library, New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, and Brazil's Universidade Federal Fluminense. ARIES is a powerful tool for art historians, both replicating and augmenting traditional methods they have long-used to study images.1 With the advent of the prevalent use of digital photos, art historians lacked the technology capable of replacing what they had previously been able to accomplish in the analogue world. Wood Ruby and Deutch realized that art historians needed an out-of-the-box solution that didn't require extensive knowledge of other disciplines (computer science and engineering). The result of successful collaborations and a generous donation, ARIES is now available in BETA form at www.artimageexplorationspace.com.

An optimistic spirit of progressive pluralism accompanied early digital work in the arts and humanities. The singular “universe” of knowledge would be amplified into a “multiverse” through faceted approaches embodying varied cultural—and even individual–viewpoints. Precisely how this utopian ideal was to be realized—through customized search or fluid ontologies or other semantic web technology—was not clear. But the motivations combined creative impulses for decolonizing and diversifying information systems.

The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). His collection of five thousand early imprints comprises foundational literature of art and archaeology, and includes a diverse range of publications in all areas of the visual arts. Our partnership's 21st- century effort advances Cicognara's Enlightenment-era ideals by making digital copies of his library available through an open access web application, where they will be fully searchable from a centralized database as well as relevant subject research interfaces. The aggregated images and text offer a potentially transformative opportunity for the discipline of art history and allied disciplines. By offering a new interface for Cicognara's collection, the endeavour allows open access availability to nearly all of the key historical volumes, the illustrations within, and the searchable metadata. The Digital Cicognara Library offers a corpus that will allow scholars to ask and answer new questions in disciplines beyond art history and archaeology, and will offer scholars of early printed books a new access point to study both the individual volumes and their relationship to each other in an accessible digital collection.

At a time when space in any academic library is at a premium, when we sometimes need to argue for shelf space rather than computers and group work pods, the University of Sydney Library has decided not only to keep and maintain its nineteenth century printing press, but to feature it through a printer in residence program.

Now in its third year, the program brings together a printmaker and a letterpress for eight weeks during semester. The intent is to engage with the library and its users, to bring the print workshop to life, to draw inspiration from the library's collection and to create a publication for the Artists’ Book Collection within Rare Books & Special Collections.

In an era of instant layout, digital word processing and electronic publishing what does the slow and laborious process of letterpress printing bring to a twenty-first century academic library? This residency demonstrates that understanding the process of making a publication can be just as vital and alive as the content of that publication - one letter at a time.

In this article, the documenta Archive is read ‘against the grain’, that is, not in search for art-historically relevant information, but, instead, so as to find traces of subjective biases in its structure and/or emotional contents in its records. The aim of this exercise is to examine the subjective nuances in the archival structure, which every archive preserves even if these are not intentionally recorded. These nuances provide glimpses into an intellectual construction that is otherwise hidden.

In recent years we have noticed a substantial increase in interest in our archive collections at the E H McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. With circulation figures for print publications generally reported to be on a downward trend for libraries, unique material is being eagerly sought out.

Who are our new audiences and how do they engage with archives in varying ways? What specific approaches have contributed to achieving this positive shift? Including observations from other research librarians and archivists, this article provides a view of art archive use and users, as well as the mechanisms that are proving successful. Our aim is to increase the visibility of our special collections to facilitate the unlocking of their powerful potential for the understanding and, sometimes, making of art.

Is the internet a tool for democracy or the manifestation of the global digital divide? Using the colonization of the internet as a starting point, this article outlines some current issues with knowledge equity, asking if democratic open access products like Wikipedia are the solution or another manifestation of the systemic bias of society. Whilst acknowledging librarianship has its own colonial legacies to address, the suggestion is made that critical librarianship can provide a response in the form of library–based edit-a-thons and Wikipedia workshops. These show how the power of Wikipedia can be used responsibly not just for enabling critical information literacy, but as an instrument for activism. In considering librarian interventions done so far at the University of the Arts, London, the article outlines future practical possibilities for decolonization, as well as looking more widely at how to democratize information in open access products and the Western publishing that sits behind them.

How are sketchbooks collected, organized, indexed and made accessible in the UK's memory institutions? My research is outlined, describing how, through interviews and a questionnaire sent to sketchbook-holding institutions, they are acquired, who they are accessed by, problems faced by those accessing them, the extent to which sketchbooks can be handled and examined physically, and the benefits and consequences of digitization and online access of sketchbooks. Finally, institutions offer ideas on how access to sketchbooks can be improved.