The vast expanse and volatility of art ephemera based on the World Wide Web pose significant threats to the completeness of the art historical record. Towards its mission to enhance the resources available for current and future research through collaboration, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) collects, preserves, and provides access to art ephemera born in digital formats native to the web. It leverages its member institutions’ collecting strengths and resources to establish a permanently sustainable web archiving programme. This article introduces NYARC's web archiving practices at the principal stages in a typical web archive's lifecycle, describes how each benefit from collaboration among its member libraries and external programme partners, and identifies opportunities for further art libraries and consortia to participate in this important effort to preserve at-risk art historical resources.

Approximately 6,000 current periodicals may be considered relevant to the art library, though no one art library can provide more than a fraction of these. Aids to the selection of an essential ‘core’ collection include specialized bibliographies; for access to periodicals outside its means or scope the art library must rely on cooperation with other libraries. Micro-publishing can play a vital part in facilitating global access. to art periodicals; meanwhile the art librariun can make a more informed selection of titles for a particular library, by analysing the needs of the library’s actual and potential users, and by studying what has been written on the history of art periodicals and of their usefulness. Excerpts from a paper presented to the ARLIS International Conference on art periodicals at the University of Sussex on April 9th.

Collecting and preserving heritage materials across the broad spectrum of the performing arts on a national scale is a daunting task. Much of the material is as ephemeral and as transitory as the theatrical experience itself. In Australia there is a realistic acceptance of the need for a distributed national collection. An active network of individuals and institutions are working to ensure the preservation of the country’s performing arts heritage and to enhance access to those collections, increasingly by electronic means.

The term ‘artists’ books’ has been used since about 1970 to denote inexpensive booklets produced by artists in ‘unlimited’ editions, but can legitimately embrace a variety of artefacts; the word ‘bookwork’, coined in 1975, carries the more specific meaning of a work of art in book form. Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in 1963, was a pioneering bookwork; it was followed by more bookworks from the same artist through the next ten years; however, Ruscha’s innovatory productions had been preceded by a number of experiments with the book format, by Bruno Munari, Åke Hodell, and others, during the 1950s and early 1960s. Bookworks flourished in the 1970s as a means of making actual works of art available to a wide audience, but in the 1980s this ideal was gradually overtaken by a growing tendency towards making bookworks as precious, costly collectables, in limited editions, while some of the earlier, once cheap bookworks began to sell for inflated prices on the secondhand market. Nonetheless, many artists are continuing to produce relatively inexpensive bookworks, sometimes using photocopiers, or to publish artists’ magazines. The work of Telfer Stokes demonstrates that the multiple book format remains an exciting and accessible medium in the hands of a committed artist.

The first art librarianship curricula were determined by the bibliographic requirements of scholarly libraries, until, the membership of ARLIS/NA revealed, in the 1970s, that programs with wider scope were needed. Today MSLS curricula for art librarians include core courses on general library topics; background courses in the humanities, archives and special collections, indexing and abstracting, and preservation; subject courses in art bibliography and visual resources; fieldwork and internships; and recommendations for institutional cognate courses in art history and museology. Qualifications emphasise subject specialisation of faculty and strong local art resources. Here curriculum objectives are enumerated, and the importance of co-ordination with related professional programs is stressed.

Identification of a visual image by computer may be achieved by ‘training’ the system to recognise examples within determined classification categories. Certain methods of achieving this have been made more feasible (particularly financially) by the advancement of silicon chip technology. This paper explains the underlying principles, with particular reference to the WISARD system developed at Brunei University, and proposes some possible applications to the classification and retrieval of art images.

Does the art library need re-placing? Using the commentary of an OCAD University faculty member concerning “a perception issue with the library and its use,” librarian Daniel Payne uses theorist Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad to decode, in general terms, undergraduate students’ understanding of libraries as articulated in the OCLC Perceptions of libraries surveys. In an attempt to re-align concepts of the library as place at OCAD University, an exhibition review interpretation of student site-interventions demonstrates how visual communication can offer more insightful “spatial practices” for both students and library staff. In the process, librarians were challenged to accommodate student creative voices that pushed both policy boundaries and comfort zones. Although a small-scale information literacy initiative in which no formal quantitative data was collected, the ability of having conceptual models of librarians interact and even clash with those of students helped realign both stakeholders’ understandings of libraries as complex spatial entities.

A description of some of the more ephemeral types of documentation surrounding contemporary art is followed by an indication of some of the problems involved in their acquisition, cataloguing and preservation. This is a revised version of a paper given at the two-day course on the Literature of Art and Architecture, organised by ARLIS and the Library Association in December 1979.

The Library of Sir Charles Eastlake (1793–1865), the first Director of the National Gallery, London, became the founding collection of the National Gallery Library. It is now being catalogued to rare book standards, and the records will be made available to researchers as part of a wider retrospective conversion and online access project. A few highlights from the Eastlake Library are described in order to illustrate the range and depth of the collection.

The greatest art library in the Netherlands returned to its original rooms inside the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. How can this library with its own rich history serve the demands of a 21st-century user? What might be the appropriate measures to counter the struggles of the first weeks after the grand re-opening? After more than a decade of reconstruction and renovation the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam was reopened on 13 April 2013. The inside of the museum has been completely transformed and the building itself has been restored to its original splendour. The largest art research library in the Netherlands has become accessible to the general public, seven days a week from 10 am to 5 pm. More then 10,000 visitors a day are eager to explore the museum as well as its unique 19th-century reading room designed by P.J.H Cuypers. But how can the original concept be adapted to present day demands?

When the Bibliothèque Nationale moves into the new Bibliothèque de France, leaving behind only six specialised departments, the opportunity will arise to use the buildings of the Rue de Richelieu site to bring together a group of art history libraries and research centres. Priority will be given to the remaining Departments of the Bibliothèque Nationale, which need more space than they presently occupy; they will be joined by the inter-university library of art and archaeology from the Rue Michelet, the central library of the national museums, from the Louvre, and the older collections of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The architectural holdings of the latter might be identified as the foundation for a major architectural collection to satisfy the demand for such a library in Paris. The collections thus brought together will not be merged, but will be exploited by means of shared services, including a union catalogue, and will be developed by means of a common acquisitions policy This concentration of resources on one site will not in itself constitute a ‘national art library’, but will provide a central node for a wider network. (An English version follows the original French text).

Chance encounters, some several years apart, form the basis of this article between 2 librarians and an artist, all 3 considering the process of decolonizing libraries within the wider context of colonial legacies in the societies in which they were born and in which they now live. The librarians Regina Vogel and Erica Foden-Lenahan have been friends and colleagues for many years, and their personal conversations over the years have often involved discussions of equality and injustice. The overlap in their professional interests led to this article proposal. A serendipitous meeting between Vogel and decolonial artist and curator Nistiman Erdede at an event2 organized by Abendschule Import in co-operation with the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and later when he visited the Kunsthalle Basel where Vogel is the librarian, changed the original direction of the article, but presented an opportunity for a 3-way discussion of decolonization in the context of a Swiss and a German art library and a refugee artist's experience. The Covid-19 border and workplace lockdowns necessitated that some of these encounters happened virtually.

Librarians, archivists, and curators today meet unique challenges when facing huge numbers of photographs accumulated in their institutions. Coming to terms with these masses in a responsible way means to reflect on cataloguing and digitization standards able to record their (material) complexity. It also means to constantly justify a series of investments: in cataloguing and digitization projects, but also in storage space, restoration, archival and conservation materials, not to speak of human resources. It means, ultimately, to reflect on the systems of value that one decides to apply while dealing with these holdings: the dematerialization rhetoric that often goes hand-in-hand with digitization campaigns tends to increase their fragility, on the other side we are confronted more and more often with the ‘contemporary repackaging of erstwhile ephemeral and disposable photographic prints' that acquire a new ‘archival value’.1 In this short essay I will focus on these systems of value. My aim is to offer some methodological tools to deal with documentary photographs in art historical institutions. These instruments derive from the intersection of photographic and archival theories and practices that shaped my experience as Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute, for more than a decade.

The Scottish Cultural Resources Network is a nationwide collaboration of institutions from many curatorial domains, which has built a massive and sustainable multimedia digital library including tens of thousands of resources for the study and appreciation of art. This paper traces the history and governance of SCRAN, with examples of how it manages the creation of digital content. It goes on to describe issues of intellectual property rights and organisational sustainability and discusses what future such a service may have. Finally, it introduces a number of SCRAN-based digital libraries, including Resources for Learning in Scotland, the AMICO Library™, and the British History Library, as well as portal services such as Netwide Search.

The National Gallery of Ireland Library has recently re-opened to internal and external readers after a number of years. The concentration so far has been on reader services, while a major revision of the cataloguing and classification procedures is being undertaken. New projects to organise the Gallery’s Archives and make them more accessible for research, and to open a sponsored Centre for the Study of Irish Art in 2002-3, show the Library’s revived interest in reaching its potential users.

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.

ARt Image Exploration Space (ARIES) is a free, cloud-based dynamic environment offering art historians and others an extensive array of practical tools for analysing images. It is the product of a successful collaboration between art historians, librarians, computer scientists, and engineers from the Frick Art Reference Library, New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, and Brazil's Universidade Federal Fluminense. ARIES is a powerful tool for art historians, both replicating and augmenting traditional methods they have long-used to study images.1 With the advent of the prevalent use of digital photos, art historians lacked the technology capable of replacing what they had previously been able to accomplish in the analogue world. Wood Ruby and Deutch realized that art historians needed an out-of-the-box solution that didn't require extensive knowledge of other disciplines (computer science and engineering). The result of successful collaborations and a generous donation, ARIES is now available in BETA form at www.artimageexplorationspace.com.

Concentrating on slides, as the major classroom teaching material for the study of art history, this paper provides an outline of procedures for their acquisition, processing, storage, circulation and management. Following on from this the development of the profession of slide curator (qualifications, training and status), and the organisations which have been formed to serve the needs of this professional group and their achievements are described, and evaluated. This paper was first delivered to the Section of Art Libraries at the IFLA Council in Montreal, August 1982.