ArtSTOR is a digital imaging initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ArtSTOR seeks to create digital image collections that respond to the needs of scholars, curators, teachers and students in the history of art and related fields of study. As a public utility, it also aims to create a secure, regulated, networked space, defined by a framework of licensing agreements that embraces content providers, subscribers and service administrators - a precinct in which educational and scholarly activities can flourish in ways that simultaneously respect intellectual property rights and encourage the ‘fair use’ of digital media.

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.

Internet resources in any discipline are difficult to locate reliably, but the problem is exacerbated for the visual arts community by the intrinsic complexity of retrieving visual resources. After a brief examination of the problems associated with the discovery of networked resources, this paper outlines the development, integration and future objectives of two visual arts information services, the Art, Design, Architecture & Media Information Gateway (ADAM) and the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), both funded for the benefit of the UK Higher Education community by the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Funding opportunities and digitisation initiatives offer libraries, galleries and museums the potential to exploit their image collections – photographs, slides, drawings, pictures and works of art – in new and exciting ways. Many different organisations are involved in developing standards for the formal description of images (e.g. artist, title, photographer) and some effort is being made to develop compatible standards for the digital environment. Indexing of images can be a difficult task because images are rich in information and may be used by widely different groups of users, who may not always express their information needs adequately. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technology, which allows the retrieval of images based on similarity to a query image, has enormous potential, particularly if it can be combined with text-based indexing.

Partnership is the watchword throughout Europe currently and libraries, museums and archives, with their wide areas of common interest, are well placed for collaborative working. In particular, technology is opening up the possibility of ever closer collaboration in the creation of a wealth of resources in digital form. While the United Kingdom plans to use digitisation, allied to changed administrative arrangements at national level, to integrate its museum, library and archive activities, the developments in collaboration in these areas in Europe also repay scrutiny.

As the range and sophistication of visual resources, and the size of collections available to the art historian and student have increased over the last century, so has the need for an appropriately qualified body of professionals to organise and develop them. This paper explains how and why those involved with visual resources have tended to have a background and training other than in librarianship, and how as a consequence, the two branches of the profession of art librarianship (textual and visual) have grown apart, with visual resources professionals allying themselves to art historical organisations. The author makes a case for the merging of the two professions, united in serving the same subject oriented clientele. This paper was first delivered to the Section of Art Libraries at the IFLA Council, in Montreal, August 1982.

Florence in Italy, a renowned centre for art and culture, has been called a ‘living museum’ of the Italian Renaissance. Today it is also the site of a co-operative international project bringing the world’s scholarly community access to the bibliographic patrimonies of a group of special art and humanities libraries. The IRIS consortium is a unique resource for art historians, but it is also of value and use for anyone interested in the many aspects of this rich artistic period.

Museums, archives and libraries comprise a spectrum of collecting institutions whose interests range from unique objects to published information. Libraries have pioneered the application of both co-operative and automated systems to their collections; museums are following their example, and are innovating in the provision of interactive information technology. Dialogue between museum and library professionals is to be encouraged, not least at an international level.

Postmodernism has stimulated a ‘new art history’, which challenged, and then displaced, the highly selective canon of the ‘Old Masters’ and ‘Modern art’ with a broader approach, recognising a wider range of art and interested in investigating both the contexts of art, and the nature of art history itself. The new art history is represented on the shelves of art libraries, but a ‘new art librarianship’ must do more than passively reflect this cultural shift. A new art librarianship will expect of art librarians that they should be aware of the ways in which art libraries legitimise certain books and artworks, thus reinforcing the hegemony of the dominant culture, and that they should be prepared to use the power of art libraries knowingly and productively. Instead of imposing order through inflexible classification schemes, the new art librarianship will embrace the ‘disorder’ of a vast complex of knowledge seen from multiple viewpoints, accommodated by hypertext, for example. It is possible that electronic networking will eventually liberate information from the custody of libraries; the new art librarianship will not resist this, but will in parallel with such developments re-value art books, and books as art, as historical artefacts, reviving a more museum-like function from the history of librarianship, while continuing to serve as a manifest symbol of the wealth of human knowledge.

Definitions are offered of the terms ‘fine arts’ and ‘special libraries’. The scope and organisation of fine art libraries are described, followed by a history of the growth of art library societies in various countries, and the movement towards international co-operation. Art libraries are demonstrated to be a suitable category to constitute a new Section in the Special Libraries Division of IFLA.

(The text of a paper presented at the Special Libraries Division Program Meeting of IFLA in Brussels, 8 September, 1977.)

This paper highlights the increasing numbers of students with disabilities in higher education. Results from international online surveys of such students, and the professionals who work with them, show that the provision of alternative format and enhanced materials is less than ideal. In particular the provision of tactile versions of images and graphics is very poor. Methods for producing such materials for blind and low-vision students are discussed.

I love the word ‘library’ and feel sorry for the French who wasted their equivalent on a mere stationery shop and cornered themselves into using the nobly historical yet somewhat dry term ‘bibliothéque’. I feel that my own books make up a library but would scarcely constitute a bibliothéque.

I am temporarily separated from the bulk of my books and thus more keenly aware than ever of their importance to me. It is not only the contents that I miss but the visible presence of them. I can picture the shelves and the configurations of buckrams and dust-jackets: in my mind’s eye particular books can be located. I see Bergson’s Creative Evolution there next to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Shall I ever read it again? I doubt it; yet the sight of it, austere on its appropriate shelf reminds me that in some sense what lies within its covers is also to be found within my head, although I cannot quote a word of it. Books do furnish a mind. The visual array of them is a house of memory in the form of a mnemonic of evocative spines.

Teaching and learning visual literacy within art and design librarianship presents several unique challenges. Librarians are better equipped than ever to meet these challenges with the help of ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, which provides an exciting opportunity to situate visual literacy within the contextual definition of information literacy for art and design students. In mapping these two documents together the author found several ways to address the more critical components of information and visual literacy in more nuanced and meaningful ways. While art librarians have often addressed visual literacy needs to varying degrees and in creative and practical ways, a more systematic approach is needed as we move forward.

The National Art Library, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, seeks to fulfil its national role by becoming the focal point of a wider network of libraries. In order to support this role, and to carry it forward into the 1990s, the Library has redesigned its management structure, developed a role as a training library for the art library profession, and applied a professional approach, involving the collection and consideration of management data, to the Library’s administration. Collection development has been redefined, shifting the emphasis from the past to the present; this has resulted in an increased intake of material, in spite of a frozen budget, with a consequent need for more space which will be provided through a reorganisation of the Library’s existing accommodation. A plan for the conservation of items in the Library’s collections is being devised. Automation, installed in 1990, brings with it further possibilities and the critical question of whether to prioritise the development of the collections or the development of access to the collections.

How is artistic research and practice output within academia to be quality assessed and made available open access on the internet? Is it possible to integrate artistic research within a framework of bibliometrics, to allocate research funding at an institution? At the University of Gothenburg, a model for addressing these questions has been implemented at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, through close collaboration between faculty representatives and the University library. The institutional repository of the university now holds a growing collection of openly available output from artistic research and practice.

The problems of tracing and acquiring exhibition catalogues are described and some practical solutions suggested. Further areas requiring action are identified. This article is a revised version of a paper delivered to the 1984 ARLIS/UK Conference in Oxford.

The Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum originated in the mid-19th century as the library of a School of Design, and adopted the title ‘The National Art Library’ later in the century following publication of the Universal Catalogue of Books on Art. Decades of steady growth and of low usage ended in the late 1960s, when sudden growth of art publishing, and of interest in art history, generated demands the Library was not equipped to meet. The Library possesses one of the world’s outstanding collections of art publications but is still funded, staffed, and administered as if its role was merely that of a Department of the Museum. Currently all aspects of the Library’s procedures and policies are under review; government funding is to be sought for a programme of computerisation, and it is hoped to redefine the Library’s role in national and international contexts and to re-establish it as the ‘heart and core’ of art library provision in the U.K., as an active participant in cooperative schemes and projects, and as a training centre for art librarianship, or in other words, as an active and truly national art library.

“‘Of course not. The model is very important. Yanaihara and Caroline feel the same way you do about it, that posing is an active participation in the work. It’s not easy, either. I know that. But Genet felt that posing was completely passive. And he stopped posing because he felt he was being transformed into an object. I thought that was a very literary attitude.’”

Art libraries, guided in part by unquestioned assumptions and market forces, tend to buy the same books while neglecting ‘ephemeral’ primary material which can often be acquired cheaply, which will be vital data for future historians, and which is likely to inspire artists then as it does now. Collections of ephemera invariably attract donations, research, and recognition. Reliance on books to document this material means accepting a selective and perhaps misleading view, at second hand, after a lapse of time. Reassessment of the significance of the images and artefacts thrown-up by our culture by means of printing and other mass-production techniques, might lead to the cooperative, rationalised acquisition, by art libraries, of both books and ephemera, and to the exploitation of the latter by inter-library lending of original material or of slides.

The Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) is still little known among library professionals, and still insufficiently known by researchers and its other potential users. Created by decree in July 2001, it has been extremely slow in gestation and researchers in the field of art have waited for it for a very long time. The Institution’s Library, comprising the largely complementary holdings of three of the main art libraries in Paris, is expected to open within a few years, and readers will be housed mainly in the beautiful Salle Labrouste, formerly occupied by users of the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale.