There remain theoretical and practical difficulties in the subject analysis of visual arts documents and the assignment of appropriate index terms. Visual arts indexing would be aided by an internationally agreed, controlled vocabulary with rules of usage. In devising such a language, subject knowledge and experience of the literature are as necessary as an understanding of indexing theory. Examples of current indexing practice are cited, notably PRECIS, Library of Congress, RILA, and the Répertoire d’Art et d’Archéologie.

This paper describes the botanical prints and drawings collection in the Botany Library, Department of Library Services, British Museum (Natural History). A short history of the collection is followed by details of acquisitions policy, curation, conservation and uses made of the collections. A selected bibliography of works, including those relating specifically to the Collections complete the paper.

Bradford had the first central library building in this country designed specifically on the subject departmentalised principle. Bradford is also the first to abandon it. The rise and fall of Bradford’s subject departments are charted and reasons are given why they were no longer felt to be appropriate in the 1980s. Some of the disadvantages of subject departments are noted.

The views expressed here are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the City Librarian or his Management Team.

This article on a classification scheme for an art school library with a strong emphasis on ‘modern’ art, updates a previous article, and draws particular attention to the revised notation.

Subject access to physical or electronic resource collections can be divided into two complementary areas: searching and browsing. Searching involves the use of subject headings, indexing terms from a controlled vocabulary, or natural language keywords. Browsing, whether along a shelf or through a subject tree on the Web, requires the application of some kind of taxonomy or classification scheme. This article looks at what class schemes art libraries are using to arrange their book collections in the UK today. Based on an informal survey via the ARLIS e-mail discussion list, it appears that the Dewey Decimal Classification is not only the most commonly used class scheme, but the one most art libraries choose when they reclassify their library.

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.

Le public des bibliothèques d’art est très largement un public étudiant et cela oriente forcément la politique documentaire de celles-ci. Sans renier ce rôle, ces bibliothèques devraient se soucier davantage des liens qu’elles devraient entretenir avec les artistes en activité. Ceci passe par une offre documentaire adaptée et des services, notamment autour de l’actualité de la vie artistique internationale, et demande des compétences particulières.

Trade cards and other trade resources in the John Johnson Collection form the theme of the forthcoming Bodleian exhibition (October 1st to Christmas 2001). In parallel with this, the trade cards have been catalogued and digitised. After a brief introduction to the John Johnson Collection and existing finding aids, this article discusses the usefulness of trade cards as a resource and the multiple access points provided by detailed cataloguing, which enable us to establish new correlations between trades.

Over the last decade, most libraries, archives and museums have undertaken some form of digitisation project, making digital surrogates of their collections available for users. We are now at a stage where we must ask: how are these resources being used? Why are they used, and by whom? Does digitisation live up to its rhetoric of improving scholarship, and improving access?

This article challenges the history and interpretation of the visual arts of Africa promulgated by much of the documentation on African art found in British art libraries — both that based on the colonial archaeological, ethnographic and anthropological approach, and that stemming from the influence of African arts on early twentieth century European art. Drawing parallels between the false picture of African history produced by colonial historians, and the perception of African art history by non-African art historians, the author draws attention to the need for Africans to document their own art, and to the lack of documentation on the contribution of Black artists to British cultural life.

The author is a South African artist and writer living in Britain, who will be exhibiting with the Midlands Art Group, Nottingham, January – February 1984. The article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the ARLIS/UK course ‘Visual art documentation for a multi-cultural society’, held on 11 November 1983 at the Commonwealth Institute, London.

Network has become a much used term in modernist studies, but what is a network and what does it tell us about a periodical? A network is a series of connections, the study of which reveals not only the modes of production, readership and social and political niches of journals, but also the constituent elements of their aesthetic discourse. This article explores the biographical, commercial and institutional connections of three periodicals at the beginning of the 20th century – the Art Journal, Connoisseur and Burlington Magazine – within the year 1903. Their different approaches to art historical analysis are also examined, not as abstract philosophies unbounded by constraints of time or context, but interpreted as texts originating from a specific and shifting history, in which the relationship with the art market emerges as crucial.

Bekanntlich ist die Kulturpolitik in Deutschland, anders als in Frankreich und England, über weite Strecken föderalistisch organisiert. So existiert denn auch in der Bundesrepublik weder eine Nationalbibliothek noch eine nationale bzw. zentrale Kunstbibliothek. In Anbetracht dieser Situation haben sich 1964 die sechs großen (west) deutschen Kunstbibliotheken von überregionaler Bedeutung zu einer Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kunstbibliotheken (AKB) zusammengeschlossen, die durch enge Kooperation ihrer Mitglieder eine optimale Literaturversorgung und -erschließung sicherstellen soil. Im Rahmen eines von der DFG gefÖrderten Programms, das 1972 angelaufen ist, wurden die Sammelschwerpunkte der teilnehmenden Bibliotheken aufeinander abgestimmt. Durch ihre kooperative Erwerbungspolitik erfüllen die (inzwischen sieben) Mitgliedsbibliotheken der AKB heute in gewisser Hinsicht die Funktion einer dezentralen Nationalbibliothek für Kunstgeschichte.

Unlike France and the United Kingdom, the organization of cultural affairs in Germany is strongly determined by federalism. So there is no national library, nor is there a particular national art library. In 1964, the six bigger (West) German art libraries of supra-regional importance formed a loose association called Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kunstbibliotheken (AKB). The purpose of the AKB is to foster co-operation on different levels (acquisition, cataloguing, etc). A co-operative acquisitions programme has been operated by the participating libraries since 1972; it is mainly financed by the German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). Thanks to this co-operation the member institutions of the AKB function in some way as a decentralized national art library.

Jules Maciet’s encyclopaedic collection of iconography in the Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, one of Paris’s most accessible specialist art libraries, offers the researcher an eclectic range of visual material from rare prints to ephemera from current elections. Its founder’s ambition that it should be exhaustive has been sustained to this day by a succession of librarians who have chosen to adhere to the original arrangement of material, which is based on a system familiar to users of print departments such as that in the Bibliothèque nationale. An index to engravers, publishers, and print-sellers, and thorough documentation of sources, make this 19th century vision a reference tool which continues to serve artists and other users today.

This article presents an insider view of engagement with critical librarianship in a higher education and arts library context. The gains from this engagement include a stronger voice in institutional dialogue and collaboration, and the development of exploratory practices in collection development and information literacy that are increasingly informed by critical perspectives.

Our experiences and examples of emerging practise highlight some of the complexities and ambiguities of critical librarianship, around novelty, compliance, institutionalisation, and the challenge of how we convert these theoretical insights into the power structures at play in libraries and archives into meaningful changes for the benefit of all of our students.

Ultimately the conclusion is that if we recognise these power structures, and the particular role of the library in knowledge production, consumption and validation, we must take critically informed action.

Over the past half-century video games have become a significant part of our cultural environment, in part, by leading advances in both technology and artistic innovation. In recent years librarians and researchers have recognized these games as cultural objects that require collection and curation. Developing and maintaining collections of this fast moving and somewhat ephemeral media, however, poses challenges due to constantly advancing technology and a corresponding lack of consistent terminology. This article addresses the literature and critical issues surrounding collections of video games within libraries and presents a case study of the University of Michigan’s Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA), one of the largest academic archives of its kind. Moreover, video games are situated in a humanistic approach to the field of game studies as the article draws on the relevance of methods from art history and film studies.

Those in charge of image collections in North America have found it difficult to agree upon standards for classifying and cataloguing their material, and many individual and incompatible systems have been developed. However there has been some recent progress in co-ordination, and this paper surveys some inter-institutional projects attempting to create standards, based on an awareness of user needs, primarily the Image Access Society, the Library of Congress list of subject headings for the Prints and Photographs Division, the Picture Division Thesaurus of the Public Archives of Canada and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus.

This paper is a continuation of a survey, “Subject indexing of visual resources: a survey”, published in Visual Resources: an International Journal of Documentation, Vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1980, pp.67-73.

In the past three years, the cultural heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina has suffered major destruction. The result is what a Council of Europe report has called ‘a cultural catastrophe’. Historical architecture (including 1,200 mosques, 150 churches, 4 synagogues and over 1,000 other monuments), works of art, as well as cultural institutions (including major museums, libraries, archives and manuscript collections) have been systematically targeted and destroyed. The losses include not only the works of art, but also crucial documentation that might aid in their reconstruction. Our Bosnian colleagues need the assistance of the international library community to help them recover and rebuild some of what has been lost and to rebuild the buildings and institutions that embody their country’s cultural heritage. Librarians outside Bosnia, through their institutions and professional organisations, can provide material and technical assistance, training, and documentation, to help undo the destruction of memory.

Collection development at Monash University Library aims to fulfil the research and curriculum needs of university staff and students. To support the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), collection development operates as a collaboration between academic faculty and the Subject Librarian. In order to further develop this collaboration and to encourage the selection and use of design resources by authors from diverse backgrounds, design lecturers and library staff have initiated The Equity Collection project. The aim of the project is to investigate the diversity of the collection in its current state and to improve its ability to reflect and extend the multicultural nature of the university community. The project includes a campaign to collect and promote books from the design world authored by under-represented groups, including Indigenous Australians, people of colour, and female and non-binary authors. This project is unique in its utilisation of the expertise of the design faculty who have extensive knowledge of authors, small publishers and less widely distributed publications.

There has been a dramatic shift in publication of scholarly art research materials from print to digital formats. In late 2013, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) was awarded a two-year grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address challenges of preservation and continued access for future researchers of these materials by implementing a web archiving programme. Due to the transition of many catalogues raisonnés to online from print, born-digital catalogues raisonnés are one of the five key collecting areas of focus for NYARC’s project. The intention of this article is to provide an introduction to the key components of the implementation of NYARC’s web archiving programme, to explore the far-flung implications of the digital shift, and to demonstrate the need for a community of collaboration in building curated web archive collections to benefit the future art historian.

The Fine Arts Library at Harvard University has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, art and architectural students, researchers and historians since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895. Library collections have been enhanced by gifts from faculty, museum publications received on exchange, and by the transfer of arts-related materials from other Harvard libraries. Although founded in the spirit of a museum library, the Fine Arts Library has increasingly developed its collections and services for a wide community of users in fields across the academic spectrum.