Based on the acceptance of a future of continuing and accelerating change, this paper looks at the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental issues which impact on us as art librarians, and looks back to see what lessons might be learned to help us deal with a future we cannot predict with any certainty.

Mergers and re-organisations within the world of art institutions have a substantial impact on art libraries, their collections and their services. Development of such combined libraries has been from small units with in-depth knowledge within a limited subject field towards a broader, more general approach to knowledge, comprising a wider variety of subjects and tasks. What impact has this had on art libraries, their parent institutions and their users and staff?

As we all cope with an e-everything world, libraries are moving to accommodate WOW (words on the web) as well as POP (print on paper) in their collections. This has led to a realignment in organisational structures, particularly in university contexts. This paper addressed two major issues: firstly the challenges that major institutional reorganisations in Australia have placed on universities and, in particular, on art schools; secondly the way these challenges may be met, based on actions and solutions to improve access to Australian visual arts information resources which followed from an extensive survey by the National Library of Australia in co-operation with ARLIS/ANZ. These results encourage art libraries to develop partnerships and networking with their parent institution and other libraries and cultural institutions on a national level.

The British Library, the UK’s national library, has often been described as a ‘hidden treasure’, with a huge amount of material and expertise which could support the creative sector, including graphic design, product design, the performing arts and fashion. During a recent visit Zandra Rhodes, the renowned fashion designer, called the Library a ‘Pandora’s Box’.

Slavic manuscripts present unique problems to the librarian, curator and scholar. Slavic works are marginalized in Western library institutions and educational curricula due to misconceptions about their intellectual value, the difficulties of studying them in Soviet and then post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and their lack of documentation, preservation and conservation. Cross-disciplinary interest, however, has expanded research beyond geographical and temporal boundaries to incorporate the technologies and viewpoints of literary criticism, historiography and even information architecture and hypertext theory. This article describes the author’s discovery of Slavic medieval manuscripts and her efforts to preserve, catalog, digitize, study and popularize them in a West that views the Middle Ages through the clouded lens of contemporary popular culture.