Rubbish for the waste-paper basket or valuable social documents? What is printed ephemera and what can it reveal to us about the everyday lives of people in the past? This brief introduction to the subject goes some way to answer these questions, and poses others.

What is ephemera? How do we catalogue it? Every library’s ephemera collection differs greatly from others in its content and cataloguing needs. Does one dictate the other? Is there a right way and a wrong way? Or just a way that is right for the library and material in hand? A look at how these things were approached at the Wellcome Library gives an example of how a successfully ordered collection can be created out of the initial chaos with just a little forethought and a lot of hard work.

Looking after ephemera collections can seem quite daunting; their contents come in all shapes and sizes and they are designed to be ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. The definition of ephemera in the Oxford pocket dictionary is ‘things of only short-lived use’, which is disheartening when we are trying to preserve these fascinating items for posterity. However, there is a lot of information available about preservation and much of this is applicable to ephemera collections.

Labels, packaging, bills, colour prints, blotters, fans, trade cards, publicity leaflets, social stationery, pious images, good-points cards, wrapping paper, golden crowns from Galettes des Rois . . . Far from being complete, this list gives just a glimpse of the iconographic collections of the Bibliothèque Forney. Alongside the prestigious collections that have always been part of the history of the institution (posters, wallpaper, printed fabrics, ancient books), the Library has in fact long been developing a collection of ephemera. These can be counted in hundreds of thousands of items, but it is difficult to be more precise; the ephemera collections grow daily, often as a result of small donations, and remarkable acquisitions enrich the collections.

The private view card is a ubiquitous form of art ephemera. Produced in large quantities and circulated widely within the art world, it has evolved over time from the simple postcard invitation to a vehicle for graphic and artistic creative licence, taking on in the process the widest (and weirdest) forms. At the same time it becomes, retrospectively, vital documentation of that art world, providing information otherwise untraceable through more conventional publications.

Art ephemera are an evocative resource that can document innovative art and convey diverse histories. This article looks at the relationship between such ephemera and contemporary art practices, and at the relative values given to ephemera by artists, curators and librarians and, in this context, considers integrated catalogues and online guides as methods of re-contextualising art ephemera in the library. Recent collaborative initiatives, and projects that identify and locate artists’ files are reviewed here and three themes are identified: the biographical approach, interfaces for distributed catalogues and the integration of art and its documentation.