This article casts a wide net over the key events, people, locations and collections that shaped the development of the Arts Library at Yale University, beginning with its inception as a humble departmental collection. While the physical spaces that have housed the library have undergone tumultuous changes over the years, the collections themselves have evolved in ways both unique to Yale and universal to the field of librarianship. In autumn 2008, the library was re-christened the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library and it is now housed within the renovated Paul Rudolph Hall and the newly constructed addition, the Jeffrey H. Loria Center for the History of Art.

Do your students look at blogs? Do you see them as information sources? Are they part of your library’s resources? This article summarises some recent research on fashion blogs, both ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, and their use in providing information to fashion students. It highlights the potential usefulness of subject blogs, based on points that arose from the data collected from fashion librarians and students in interviews, an online survey and a round-table discussion. Hopefully the results will encourage you to consider your own stance on blog information in the library, whichever subject you support.

Design innovations in India’s fashion products result from a fusion of modern technologies and traditional craft skills. This paper highlights the role of the National Resource Centre and the network of resource centres of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in collecting and preserving heritage resources using computer technology. Plans for a National Design Repository and for Shilpakala Jnana Kosha, a digital repository for the tacit craft knowledge of artisans, share the objectives of preserving endangered traditional skills, supporting a process of revival and optimising the use of traditional crafts in contemporary fashion design.

Words have been affixed to still images for hundreds of years to describe who created a work or what it portrays. This paper examines the ways this process might evolve in an era where dissemination of knowledge is far less linear than it was in an age of print, and reviews two projects that ARTstor is pursuing with the art historical community. One captures users’ notes about 190,000 photographs of old master drawings that are in need of updated descriptive cataloging. The other will create a Built Works Registry through the use of a credentialed Wikipedia-like strategy.

It is undoubtedly an appropriate time to promote discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of traditional library cataloguing policies and practices, and to identify some potential improvements for the future. Four major recent reports on the future of library catalogues, produced by some of the key international players in the library world, have come up with remarkably similar conclusions and could provide libraries with some practical guidelines for improvement which enjoy a broad measure of international support in the library world.

Working in a large university library provides daily challenges in giving appropriate advice to students and researchers when they search for art history material. One of the biggest of these is how to choose the best databases to use, and the survey described below aimed to provide better information on which to base decisions about which the library should subscribe to. Many libraries face the same problems. What is really covered in the different databases? And how do they communicate with other library systems and electronic resources?