The BAEP Group (Bibliotecas de arte de España y Portugal) has travelled a long way in the last ten years. It has undertaken numerous co-operative activities: conferences, training, publications, projects to produce union catalogues and organise exchanges between libraries, creation of a web site, and international collaboration. Despite these achievements the Group has not so far constituted itself formally and it now has to decide whether to continue as an independent society of art librarians or to attach itself to a more general library association.

The French national museum libraries service comprises 21 libraries specialising in the history of western art and archaeology. The central library, which is at the head of the network, was automated first and has completed its retrospective conversion. At first this library catalogued the material acquired for all the others; then a number of them were able in their turn to computerise and thus contribute directly to the union catalogue of the national museum libraries. This can now be consulted on the internet site of the Ministry of Culture.

The Virtueller Katalog Kunstgeschichte (VKK) is a specialized search engine based on the technique of the perhaps better-known Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog. It is an initiative of the working group formerly known as AKB, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kunstbibliotheken, comprising the German art libraries funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The VKK has functioned since September 1999. Currently, almost all AKB members, in other words the most important German art libraries, are among the target systems. Together, the target systems already offer far more than 1.6 million bibliographic records. The newest participant is the union catalogue of one of the most distinguished art historical networks, the IRIS Consortium in Florence. The VKK, which has just received a new, multilingual interface, is intended to become a gateway to the OPACs of the most important libraries and networks on an international level, and thus a central tool for specialized art historical research. This paper is also an invitation for potential new international partners.

Find it in London is the first pilot project of its kind in London. Using ten partner institutions across the archive, library and museum domains, it tests the concept of searching in one single step across these sectors for relevant collections. The pilot database, though currently small, allows an information seeker to choose a subject and find out which archives, libraries and museums in the pilot have collections which may be of interest. The next step will be to seek further substantial funding to scale the project up across the full span of London’s information treasure troves and create a world-beating web-based lookup subject tool.

Backstage, a major resource discovery project for the performing arts, aims to create a single portal for information on performing arts holdings across the UK. Its content will combine directory-style information for individual institutions with more detailed collection level and item level records. The project has provided an opportunity for cross-sectoral working for the main partners – a group of universities led by Kent and Bristol, plus the Theatre Museum and the Institute for Learning & Research Technology – but problems of uneven funding available to the different sectors have had to be overcome. The project was due for completion in October 2002.

The Archirès network, linking the libraries and documentation centres in schools of architecture, has been in existence for more than 30 years. Over that time several institutions have joined it, including the Institut français d’architecture, the Ecole spéciale d’architecture, the Institut St. Luc, St. Gilles in Brussels, the Ecole d’architecture in Geneva and, last year, the Ecole nationale d’architecture in Rabat. The core task of indexing journal articles into a common database that is now searchable on the Web is only one of a number of co-operative projects which have improved access to information in this subject field. However the close relationship between architecture and art makes it imperative also to develop closer relationships with the schools of art.

Following the ARLIS/UK & Ireland study visit to libraries in Stockholm in June 2002, this article reports on the many fascinating aspects of the libraries visited, with particular emphasis on co-operation amongst them and especially the central role of the Royal Library/National Library of Sweden. Swedish colleagues have been most helpful in providing some of the details below, which are supplemented by data drawn from the web pages listed. Some information has also been adapted from reports by colleagues on this visit.

The authors of this article, one from Sweden, the other from Denmark, have recently completed a collaborative project under the IFLA umbrella to produce guidelines for libraries providing services to users suffering from dyslexia. Many artists and art students have problems reading published material, yet art librarians still know far too little about how they can make access easier for them. This new publication stresses the importance of knowledge about dyslexia by all library employees and gives practical help and advice about training staff, producing information materials and setting up web sites.