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.

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.

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.

Exhibition catalogs and related ‘ephemera’ frequently include statements by artists which can be regarded as primary documents. Artists’ statements which are included in catalogs of group exhibitions tend to be relatively difficult to access and so are easily overlooked, while statements included in ephemeral publications associated with group exhibitions are virtually irretrievable even when such material is retained by libraries. Some help is available from published bibliographies and online databases; more thorough cataloging procedures are also available.

Ephemera, the fleeting images of moments in time, are valuable for the historical perspectives, social insights and visual stimuli they can generate. The means of collecting are various and frequently cheap. Collections can be organised along simple or sophisticated lines depending on individual libraries’ resources.

These notes started life as a short paper, presented to audiences at Sydney, Melbourne, and Hobart during a tour of Australia which the author made at the invitation of ARLIS/ANZ in September 1979; in this revised and extended form they were read to an inaugural meeting of an ARLIS North West of England group, at Preston Polytechnic on October 31st 1979.

As the number of digital images available to art historians grows apace, it is perhaps an opportune moment to consider what impact digital images have had on the discipline and on the work methods of art historians. This paper revisits the findings of a research project – Compare and contrast – focusing on the attitudes of art historians towards digital image technologies, the role of the technologies in the different phases and activities of the research process, the tools and their potential, and barriers to the use of digital images.

Libraries can easily be integrated into a museum’s activities, since museums too have functions that require the processing of information, such as preservation, research and communication. However museums in Turkey were not notable for developing efficient art libraries until Istanbul Museum of Modern Art opened. The distinctiveness of this museum’s library results from a change in the museum environment in Turkey, and the introduction of a number of features that are new in art libraries in this country.

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.

Art libraries are in many instances particularly well placed to operate international exchanges of publications, especially when (as in the case of museum libraries) they serve institutions which publish art documentation. It is nevertheless necessary to be aware of the hidden costs which can exist, and to examine the reasons for and the cost-effectiveness of exchange programmes. Guidelines for efficient and effective exchange are suggested.

The traditional subject category ‘visual arts’ is based on a value judgment, but aesthetic criteria no longer suffice to define this category. Art is increasingly permissive in its range. The subjects of art history, archaeology, social anthropology, and history of technology tend more and more to overlap. Almost any material artefact can now be viewed aesthetically, and any work of visual art may be considered as an artefact. Libraries should aim to bring together all the material culture of human societies, whether tools or works of art, in their bibliographic classifications instead of scattering it as at present.

(Slightly revised version of a paper given at the Art Libraries Round Table, 45th IFLA Congress, Copenhagen, 1979.)

‘Universal Availability of Publications’ (UAP) and the universal availability of art publications should be considered in the context of ‘one world’, a world in which we all share responsibility for our fellow human beings. In this context both librarianship and art, and thus art librarianship also, should be seen as services rendered to humankind at large. IFLA’s UAP programme has been conceived as a service, intended to supply genuine human needs, and art librarians, who are constantly frustrated in their efforts to serve users of art libraries by the limitations to the availability of art documentation, can readily identify a need for ‘Universal Availability of Art Publications’. Nevertheless, a worldwide programme of this nature is in danger, first, of being pursued for its own sake (or for the sake of ‘needs’ which are imagined, over-emphasised, or misconceived), and second, of reinforcing cultural imperialism. Safeguards include acceptance of the necessity to proceed step by step in pursuit of a success which can never be complete; the fact that UAP is founded on local collections developed to meet local needs; recognition of the imbalance in the production of publications in different parts of the world; and recognition of the importance of unpublished documentation and of ‘publications’ which do not as yet exist. A greater emphasis on increasing the availability, and generating the production, of publications from countries which publish relatively little, is proposed. A fourth safeguard ought to derive from the professional ethics and grass-roots experience of librarians, who serve and identify with library users, actual and potential. The pursuit of universal availability of art publications should be based on realistic assessment of what is feasible, and on local, regional, and national resources, with all possible encouragement being given to developing countries to document their own arts. Art librarians may be paying too little attention to the needs of users and, especially, of non-users of art libraries, and should be aware of the barriers to availability which can result from the prevalence of a narrow, elitist conception of ‘Art’ and from the provision of library services primarily for an elite. Without neglecting the service of scholarship, the art library profession should try to shift the balance of its commitment towards the provision of a service for everyone, everywhere, so that our interpretation and pursuit of the ‘Universal Availability of Art Publications’ truly reflects a vision of our whole world’s heritage and practice ‘of divers arts’.

This is the text of a paper presented to the Section of Art Libraries, at the 1985 IFLA Council in Chicago.

Arts students access information and find inspiration through a cornucopia of resources both within and outside of the library. Informed by creativity theory and information needs studies, this case study set out to identify the needs and behaviours of first year undergraduate students at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. The use of multiple collection techniques captured rich data and provided an insight into ways of enhancing outreach both in the physical environment and online.

Although art librarians began to join together in North America in the 1920s, they did so in two distinct strands — museum librarians and public librarians. Art librarians of all kinds, including, significantly, art librarians in higher education, formed national associations from the late 1960s, and almost immediately began to establish the international links which culminated in the coming into being of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries. International cooperation, including networking of resources, is helping art libraries to serve users worldwide. Art librarianship is now so well established as an international enterprise that it can afford to admit other arts information professionals; nonetheless it needs to continue to work towards becoming a genuinely multi-cultural professional community which does not privilege any country, region, language, culture, gender, or point of view.

This overview of the London Institute Library and Learning Resources website, the i page, focuses in particular on issues involved in selecting and evaluating high quality resources in an academic context. The article begins by detailing the philosophy, design and initial construction of the site, and gives an outline of the structure. The most heavily used section of the i page is the web guides and the evaluation criteria applied to web resources selected for inclusion are examined, with reference to the digital art web guide. The main criteria of content, structure, authority and subjectivity are looked at in detail. The process of user feedback is highlighted and, as the site is now over two years old, pertinent issues relating to its future growth and development are also discussed.

How can cultural heritage institutions use new technologies to improve access to holdings for remote users when so much material is protected by copyright and the repository is normally not the copyright owner? Many American institutions have put material online even when they do not own the copyright, after taking thoughtful measures to minimize the risk that this may incur. Others have elected to forego any efforts to control the use of public domain reproductions from their holdings.

The Times Literary Supplement on March 21st 1975 printed an article by you entitled ‘Fashions in fashion history’. Subsequently you have said that your aim in publishing that piece was ‘to try to persuade publishers to put out some useful material’, such as annotated transcriptions of important inventories listing items of dress, and a series of books dealing with changes in fashion in particular places at particular times. What do you see as the major gaps in the literature of fashion at the present time?

Aquarelle is a flagship project developing the Information Network on Cultural Heritage, funded under the European Commission’s Telematics Applications Programme. It has created a distributed multimedia information system, offering access to interrelated multimedia reference documents and primary data that describe the cultural heritage of Europe. It aims to create the technology to enable a service which would provide uniform access to the varied collections of data held by museums, art galleries and other cultural organisations throughout Europe.