Learning about Japanese art has been difficult for Westerners. Limited access, language barriers, and cultural misunderstanding have been almost insurmountable obstacles. Knowledge of Japanese art in the West began over 150 years before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853. Englebert Kaempfer (1657-1716), sent to Japan as a physician for the Dutch East India Company, befriended a young assistant who provided information for a book on Japanese life and history published in 1727. By 1850, more ethnographic information had been published in Europe. Catalogs of sales of Japanese art in Europe exist prior to 1850 and collection catalogs from major museums follow in the second half of that century. After the Meiji Restoration (1867) cultural exchange was possible and organizations for that purpose were formed. Diaries of 19th century travellers and important international fairs further expanded cross-cultural information. Okakura Kakuzo, a native of Japan, published in English about Japanese art and ultimately became Curator of the important collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The advent of photography made visual images easily accessible to Westerners. Great collectors built up the holdings of major American museums. In the 20th century, materials written and published in Japan in English language have furthered understanding of Japanese culture. During the past twenty years, travelling exhibitions and scholarly catalogs have circulated in the West. Presently monographs, dissertations and translated scholarly texts are available. Unfortunately, there is little understanding in the West of the organization of Japanese art libraries and archives which contain primary source material of interest to art historians.

Since their appearance in the early 20th century, catalogues prepared for exhibitions of African art have undergone a gradual transformation. Beginning as mere checklists many of these publications have, in the 1970s and 80s, evolved into major scholarly works whose significance transcends their original purpose as guides to the exhibitions. Changes occurring over the years are traced through examination of the form and content of representative catalogues and by review of the reception by art historians of many of these works into the corpus of literature of African art. The growing importance of exhibition catalogues as important art historical documents is also demonstrated by a chronological analysis of bibliographic citations in the major scholarly journal of African art in the United States. Finally, scrutiny of sources and annotations included in an important bibliographic guide to the literature of African art indicates how firmly established the exhibition catalogue has become as one of the most important publication forms for the dissemination of scholarly writing on African art.

[This paper won the ARLIS/NA Gerd Muehsam Award for 1986. We hope to publish a sequel in a future issue, on exhibitions of African art in Africa and the development of catalogues written by Africans. Editor].

artlibraries.net, formerly the VKK, is an international specialised meta catalogue allowing the integrated retrieval of bibliographic records and, should the occasion arise, other objects from distinctive art historical databases. This article analyses artlibraries.net from a functional point of view, but also discusses the cataloguing and subject indexing practice prevailing in art libraries internationally. It aims to identify some parameters for the future of art bibliography.

A brief outline is given of events which in 1979 led to the Art and Design Library being moved out of the main faculty block at Grand Parade into an adjacent building. This is followed by a description and assessment of the improved facilities in the new library.

Acknowledgements are due to Leslie Willmot, site librarian from 1962-1977, for his help with information on the development of the Library. Photographs courtesy of Zul Mukhida.

This article outlines the origin and development of picture lending services in Germany and the United Kingdom and explains the cross-fertilisation of ideas between Germany and the United Kingdom which has led to the present spread of collections in both countries. However economic constraints are now affecting the working of existing services and limiting the establishment of new ones, and new methods of financial distribution are necessary.

Latin American culture is very rich, yet there is insufficient documentation on Latin American art, and much of the documentation which does exist is not adequately covered by the major art indexes. A number of magazines have set out, especially since the 1940s, to disseminate information about Latin American art, but most have been short-lived. The LATINOARTE project, based in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), aims to develop and to network a database including citations to documentation available in 62 libraries and information centres inside and outside Latin America. Already, some 1,500 records are available on contemporary Latin American art. (The edited text of a paper presented to the IFLA Section of Art Libraries at the IFLA General Conference at Havana, August 1994.)

Based on the open-source IIIF image viewer Mirador 3, the Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - arthistoricum.net, in cooperation with NFDI4Culture, the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage, provides a platform for collaborative exploration of image resources. Within the virtual research environment, users can create their own workspaces and image collections individually or in groups, share them for collaborative efforts, and jointly create persistent annotations. This article outlines the development and integration process of this web-based research platform and highlights future areas of improvement.

In 2009, I was two years into my tenure as a museum employee, managing a collection of small exhibition brochures, pamphlets and gallery announcements at the National Gallery of Art Library. That summer, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith reported on a phenomenon I had also observed in my capacity as Reference Librarian for Vertical Files: the decline of the printed gallery post card. Smith's ArtsBeat blog post, ‘Gallery Card as Relic,’ is a breezy elegy surveying recent “final notice” cards mailed from commercial galleries that were “going green” by eliminating paper mailings. I, however, was feeling less light-hearted about the demise of what Smith describes as a “useful bit of art-world indicator…[and] an indispensable constant creatively deployed by artists, avidly cherished by the ephemera-obsessed and devotedly archived by museums.”

The Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design is a successful reinvention of the art library through the adaptive re-use of an historic bank building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to reviewing how the library's goals were met during its first decade, the most significant change, the transformation of the slide library into a material resource centre and the growth of a community of such collections and related initiatives, will be described.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, itself an archive of material culture, houses several collections of archival records. The Museum’s Registered Papers are divided between the Museum itself, which holds those papers relating to objects in the Museum, and the Public Record Office, where papers relating to Museum buildings and administration can be found; all papers produced since 1984 are to be housed together in a newly established V & A Archive. The quality of the archive of Registered Papers is uneven due to the lack of a controlling and unifying policy; this, and questions of conservation and administration, are being addressed as part of the current restructuring of the Museum. For the same reason the archives of the different Departments, though important, vary considerably not only in content but also in their organisation. The National Art Library, part of the V & A, includes archival collections of ephemera, comprising examples of printing and graphic design, and of manuscripts, including artists’ papers; it also includes the Archive of Art and Design, founded in 1978 to avoid the splitting up of significant archives between the Museum’s Departments.

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)-SUNY Gladys Marcus Library's exquisite, rare, primary research materials are housed in its unit of Special Collections and College Archives; as such, it is known to those who study fashion and other creative industries throughout the world.

Like the unit's name, its mission is two-fold: regarding special collections, it acquires, preserves, and provides access to a wide range of primary research materials in their original formats and across many languages and geographical spectra. All acquisitions support one or more curricula offered at FIT. Regarding the college archives, the unit acquires, preserves, and provides access to college records permanently-scheduled for retention, or deemed to have enduring, historical value, created or received in the course of college business; archival records are created or received by administrators, staff, faculty, and students. Fulfilling this mission supports myriad goals in and across FIT units as well as research from those outside the FIT community.

This writer will introduce the collections to readers and briefly discuss the large-scale renovation that the unit is currently under-going.

During the move to a new location in 2016-2017, the headquarters of Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) in Bangkok applied a service design approach to devise and deploy new and improved services. Applying a case study approach, this article reports the TCDC experience in adopting a service design approach in its library function at the TCDC Resource Center. The initiative aimed to create a new service blueprint as well as to implement new and updated services to meet ever-changing user needs. It is expected that service design will increase the user satisfaction level, which will lead to an increasing number of members and visitors, as well as promote revisits and brand loyalty. The process included developing empathy, service ideation, prototyping, and testing. As a result, several new and updated services were introduced and implemented both in the physical space and online. As an iterative process, the design team has also provided multiple channels to receive feedback from users both directly and indirectly to ensure continuous improvement of its services and products.

The renovation project of the Forney Decorative and Applied Arts Library in Paris, belonging to the Paris Specialized Libraries' Network, not only concerns the modernization, restructuring and security of the building, an historical monument, but also the library usage, with an ambitious cultural project underpinning the rooms' refurbishment aimed at providing greater public access to the library, the building, and the spectacular visual collections. New visitors, alongside established readers, are welcomed in the heart of the tourist centre of Paris.

Fashion is often held synonymous with frivolity, excess, and luxury; as such, the study of costume history and theory has historically been considered impractical or subsidiary. The significant rise in costume education and scholarship during the 20th century has brought new and more frequent queries regarding the histories of fashion, etiquette, and material culture to our libraries. We are now often asked to assist in researches of cultures of style, and how they may be analyzed in a multidisciplinary context. Is it possible to analyze fashion trends through the lens of the law? Are effects of American colonialism present in fashion trends today? This brief historiography of costume and fashion studies seeks to utilize a multi- and interdisciplinary lens that reference librarians may employ to assist patrons with style-related inquiries.

Picture lending has, at different times and in different places, been championed by individuals who have regarded it — with some difference of emphasis and interpretation — as a means both of helping artists and of bringing art into people’s lives. Ten such individuals are profiled: Heinrich Schulz; the more radical Otto Nagel, and Rudolf Bosselt, who were active in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; Franz Roh and Eva Pietzsch, whose work continued into the post-War period in West Germany; Pieter Kooistra, founder of the SBK network in the Netherlands; Knud Pedersen in Denmark; Karl-Heinz Bolay, who became a leading librarian in Sweden; and Heinz Werner and Isolde PreiBler, who championed the cause of picture lending in East Germany, in circumstances which imposed severe limitations on what could be achieved until German unification opened up new possibilities. (An English version follows the German original).

How can European library staff working in digital humanities connect with peers in the library sector, determine where to find relevant information about digital scholarship, provide their collections as data and to be an equal partner in digital humanities research? The LIBER Digital Humanities Working Group was created as a participatory knowledge network in 2017 to address these questions. Through a series of workshops, knowledge sharing activities, and a Europe-wide survey and resulting report, the Working Group engaged with the international LIBER DH community. Useful reflections are provided on organising an open, voluntary DH community and planning for inclusive activities that benefit digital scholarship in European research libraries.