Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have transformed the Higher Education sector world-wide, educating diverse audiences through Open Access content and resources. Very few have been integrated into the museum experience; however there is signifi cant potential for MOOCs to revolutionise access to the collections of art museums and galleries. This article presents empirical evidence drawing from a review of literature, and provides a case study into copyright challenges encountered using art images and video in a MOOC environment. Specific examples have been selected from the FutureLearn/ Monash University Creative Coding MOOC launched in June 2014, discussing the role that an Art Librarian plays in this process. This will be of interest to a broader museum and gallery audience, embarking on provision of online educative programs for users.

The temporary cessation to publication of the leading and most comprehensive bibliography in the arts, the International bibliography of art (formerly Bibliography of the history of art) in 2009, led to a lively debate on the future of art bibliography. Many scholars, librarians and information specialists were in favour of saving the established model and of ensuring its continuing existence. At the same time there arose the controversial and much-debated question of whether the traditional model of the IBA – grounded in an intellectual analysis of documents (articles from journals, monographs, exhibition catalogues, etc.) and their description with standardised metadata and abstracts – still corresponds to the needs of modern research on the one hand and to the new potentialities and realities of displaying, connecting, exchanging and gaining information in digital data networks on the other. Library catalogues play a decisive role in this consideration: unlike bibliographies, which follow traditional and more or less unvaried standards, they have mutated to a great degree from inflexible registers to dynamic networks. They enrich and connect the bibliographic information with additional data, they invite the user to tag and to review the corresponding literature and they enable complex forms of unforeseeable discovery. Thus the ‘crisis’ into which art bibliography was plunged when the old IBA ceased publication, at the same time opened up the opportunity to discuss alternative, future-oriented solutions for the appropriate format of bibliographic information supply in the arts today.

Photography has long been a part of the Library of Congress classification tables. At the time of its inclusion, photography was not considered an art form and thus was placed in the T – Technology schedule instead of the N – Fine Arts schedule. This article will discuss various aspects of photography classification, including its history, the reasons behind and development of alternative schedules, the challenges of classifying artists’ books with a photographic basis, and the feasibility of maintaining alternative schedules with the proliferation of shelf-ready books.

The Prado-Recoletos axis is the main historical boulevard in Madrid, which contains the most important concentration of art museums in all of Spain: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. In the last years, they have undergone extensive renovation. The different renovation projects can be used to examine how museum libraries today juggle the needs of their users while addressing the challenge of providing the services of a modern research library. The new State Museum Libraries Network (BIMUS) has been an important factor in this development.

Located on Treaty #13 (Toronto Purchase) territory, OCAD University offers an Indigenous Visual Culture (INVC) program that leads to a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree or an interdisciplinary minor. The curriculum combines courses in the cultural, social and political history of Indigenous peoples, preparing students to engage in global discourses in contemporary art practice through a profound understanding of story-telling as the foundation of visual culture.

A narrative framework is used to present an information literacy interaction with an INVC course from the perspectives of a librarian from the Canadian settler population and an assistant professor, who is a member of the Métis Indigenous nation. Research and evaluation models are presented; ones that emerged from traditional information literacy concepts informed and transformed by Indigenous knowledge systems. Finally, student learning outcomes from the course are presented through an exhibition of artworks and artist statements that display their visual story-telling skills.

Gaining access to primary research materials is critical to the support of research and learning. The Research Libraries Group’s initiatives to make archival materials, and museum objects and their records, available in an electronic environment are exploring the technical possibilities of achieving international, integrated access to textual and visual materials. That seamless web of resources so desired by researchers is getting ever closer to reality.

Established in 1960, the Museum van het Boek is known for its holdings and exhibitions of Western book art from the last 110 years. Building on the starter collections of two donors, a private printer and a bibliophile, the Museum’s acquisitions now focus mainly on modern book art. More than 25,000 of the 450,000 objects in the Museum are books showing the development of standard Dutch publishing, the work of individual book illustrators, type designers and calligraphers, contemporary Dutch private presses and artists’ books. There is also considerable foreign material, notably from Germany and Great Britain.

Following the FAB Supplemental Meetings held 21-23 June 2010 at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), there was general agreement that two prototype applications should be built to provide new ideas and technical approaches to compare/contrast to the artlibraries.net model. Jim Michalko, Vice President of OCLC Research, agreed that OCLC would build a prototype modeling a group catalog of art history libraries within the OCLC membership, while the GRI committed to building one on a Solr/Lucene platform that combined heterogeneous data sources from some of the FAB members. The resulting prototypes were publicly demonstrated at the artlibraries.net Users Group Meeting in Lisbon in October 2010. Other articles in this issue detail the deficiencies of the current bibliographic model and the information needs of the 21st-century art history scholar. The prototype development was based upon and informed by these issues, and sought to define possible technical solutions to overcome some of these inadequacies. The prototypes must also extend the paradigm of bibliography being contained within an abstracting and indexing construct, and move towards a concept of ‘complete bibliography’.

In July of 2003 Corbis Corporation began an initiative to offer educational institutions fair-use access to the world’s largest and most diverse archive of digital images. At a time when many visual resource collections are struggling with how to satisfy the digital needs of their faculty and students, Corbis is hoping to help meet this challenge. Our experience with digital archive development and image management, albeit on a larger scale, closely mirrors much of what visual resource collections are tasked with today. This article introduces readers to Corbis and gives details about our collection of images, outlining what is available through the new Corbis Education program.

I’ve called this paper ‘The New Bauhaus: an art education for the 21st century’ – and it involves an element of prediction, which is always high risk in the unpredictable worlds of art and design. Let me start, as a cautionary tale and as a curtain-raiser, with the example of a designer who thought he was rather good at looking ahead.

This article presents a practice-based account of collection development related to zines in the British Library. Rather than making the case for the collecting of zines, it aims to describe the process of collection building in a specific time and place, so that researchers have a better understanding of why certain resources are offered to them and others are not, and to share experiences with other librarians with zine collections. Zines form an element of the cultural memory of activists and cultural creators, and for researchers studying them it would seem useful to make transparent the motivations, methods and limitations of collection building. Librarians in the USA have written about their collecting practices for some time, for instance at Barnard College1 and New York Public Library2, there has been less written about the practices of UK libraries. The article aims to make a contribution as a case study alongside accounts of collection development in a range of other libraries with zine collections, and it is written primarily from my own perspective as a curator in Contemporary British Collections since 2015, focusing on current practice, with some reference to earlier collecting.

From the outset ARLIS has consistently published serials, from the ARLIS Newsletter to the present Art Libraries Journal (with its international role) and the ARLIS News-sheet (for current and domestic information). An annual Directory of Members has provided vital information about ARLIS membership. Monographs and occasional publications, some published by ARLIS and some in collaboration with other publishers, have included a variety of manuals, guidelines, directories, indexes and union lists. A full list of publications is appended.

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’.

Mr James Christie (1730-1803) became London’s premier auctioneer in the 1760s and he was still at the top of his profession at his death in 1803. This brief history of the man and his auction house outlines his early career in Covent Garden, the setting up of his own auction rooms during the 1760s and some of his early successes. He came to rely less on the three D’s: Death, Divorce and Debt (still the primary reason for selling at auction in the 21st century) for the source of goods, and also moved away from run-of-the-mill anonymous household furniture sales. Christie encouraged a new breed of seller – the lords and ladies of the land together with princes and royals – and the article highlights a few of the varied characters who entrusted James Christie with the sale of their property.