First of all an apology is in order for everyone who was expecting a special fashion issue. I had to split issue three into issues three and four to avoid going over our total page count, which pushes the fashion issue into 2017. I promise, though, it is coming.

”I feel about art librarianship as I feel about ghosts”. There is simply no other way to start once you've read Antony Croghan's viewpoint on the state of art librarianship published in the spring 1977 edition of the Art Libraries Journal. But perhaps almost 40 years on I have a more positive outlook than Mr. Croghan as I do believe in both and I'm not afraid of either!

What can current students preparing for careers as librarians, archivists and museum curators learn from the book as object and the book as art? How can artists’ books and artisans engaged in bookmaking, conservation and curating books inform our ideas of the book as more than its text? How does bookmaking deepen the connection for students between content and form? This article describes a 6-week workshop conducted at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto that explores the book from its earliest forms to artists’ books and includes many descriptions of books constructed by iSchool students.

Copyright legislation in the UK changed significantly in 2014, and this article provides an overview to some of the most relevant changes to the exceptions1 in copyright law that can be used by archivists and librarians. Subscribers to ALJ will have read Tim Padfield's excellent introduction to UK copyright law for art librarians in 2012, much of which is still relevant and will not be repeated here. Given the varied nature of art library and archive collections in the UK, and the complex nature of the law in this area, it is intended that the following general guidance to the 2014 legislative changes will highlight areas for further study: such basic guidance should not be used to inform internal policy or decision-making. The article also includes a list of sources for more detailed information on the law, in the references section.

Ffotogallery's photographic survey and archive The Valleys Project was initiated at a time of significant social and economic upheaval in south east Wales. This article explores the contexts for the establishment of the project in the early 1980s and how it was subsequently shaped by political and institutional advocacy as well as the emerging importance of creative photographic practice as a recognized independent activity in the UK and beyond.

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 Great Book of Ireland, Leabhar Mór na hÉireann, is an extraordinary modern vellum manuscript in a single volume which comprises the original work of 120 artists, 140 poets and nine composers. Produced in Dublin between 1989 and 1991, it has been acquired by University College Cork to be preserved in posterity on behalf of the Irish people.

Conceived originally as a venture to create a saleable artefact which would help to fund the development plans of two arts organizations in Ireland, the original architects of the idea and editors of the end product were Theo Dorgan of Poetry Ireland and Gene Lambert of Clashganna Mills, with Eamonn Martin as business manager. Out of their initial meeting in March 1989 came the first tentative idea of producing an original artefact that would raise substantial funds for their charitable-status arts organizations, while at the same time being a venture worthwhile in itself. What was to emerge was a project of breath-taking ambition and scale – The Great Book of Ireland, Leabhar Mór na hÉireann, completed in 1991.

Artists, poets, and composers were asked to contribute in their own medium what they believed represented their hopes, fears, dreams, or imaginings in the Ireland of that particular time, and which would have resonance in a thousand years - as the longevity of vellum allows. Each page of The Great Book is a unique artefact in itself, often multi-layered or palimpsestial in nature. The whole “united” in design by the work of the scribe, Denis Brown.

This paper will describes the creation process of the book, its subsequent history, and future plans for the book at University College Cork.

Michael Takeo Magruder, visual artist and researcher, discusses his digital and new media art and practice with Jeremy Pilcher, lawyer and academic, whose research engages with the intersection of art and law. Takeo's work asks viewers to question their relationship both to and within the real-time data flows generated by emerging technologies and the implications these have for archives. His art concerns the way institutions use such systems to create narratives that structure societies. This conversation discusses how Takeo's practice invites us, as individuals, to critically reflect on the implications of the stories that are both told to and about us by using gathered and distributed data.

In 2011, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales embarked on a project to digitize a selection of its historic photography holdings. It was the first time that the collections were looked at holistically. The project brought together curators from all collecting areas, encouraging cross departmental engagement, and brought to light collections that spanned numerous departments. How were collections chosen for digitization? What lessons were learned? The issues of incomplete metadata, the use of multiple numerical references and the varied way in which departments recorded data were just some of the issues faced by the project team. After three years, the rich historic photography collections are not only better understood, but there is now a legacy for further research and public dissemination.

Object-based learning lies at the heart of teaching in both historical bibliography and cataloguing classes on the MA Library and Information Studies at UCL. Tom Phillips's work A humument and the novel he chose to use as his canvas, W.H. Mallock's A human document provide memorable ‘object lessons’ with scope for students to synthesize and evaluate their pre-existing learning from inside and outside the modules. It is important that the examples used in class are simple enough to illustrate the strengths of any conceptual model yet complex enough to highlight its limits. It is also ideal if examples can be beautiful as well as useful. A humument fulfills all these criteria and, for students with no background in art or art librarianship, also introduces the artists' book as a genre and artists themselves as an important and interesting user group within information services.

The focus of this article will be on the artistic practice of found footage film-making—with which is understood the practice of creating new films with extant material—and the ‘aesthetics of access’. Lucas Hilderbrand introduces this term in his 2009 publication Inherent Vice, in which he assembles issues of copyright, preservation and bootlegging and applies it to the specific case study of VHS. When he speaks of aesthetics of access he does so in reference to the formal characteristics of the image. That is how the term is intended here as well. So for instance, film-maker Matthias Müller shot the footage he has used to compile his found footage film Home Stories (1990) with a 16 mm film camera off a television screen. Whether this mode of production was favoured for its specific visual impact or for circumventing having to obtain permission to re-use the (mainly Hollywood feature) film material, the resulting slightly degraded look of the duplicated material is a direct result of how the material was accessed, hence its ‘aesthetics of access’. This article argues that the legal provenance of archival material, and potential ways of circumventing legal restrictions in obtaining that material, can be traced in the ultimate form of found footage films. It also argues that in their new amalgamated states, the films emphasise such concepts as ownership and authorship and that they can be seen as illustrative in their allusions to the ways that institutional context, copyright and film form are interdependent.

Definitions, uses and management of ephemera are explored in this article, a response to the pioneering ‘Arty choke: acquisition and ephemera’ by Nik Pollard, published in the 1977 winter issue of Art Libraries Journal. The author, in conversation with the Librarian of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, discusses key ideas put forward in the original text and assess their relevance in relation to current art ephemera collections in UK libraries.

The London Centre for Book Arts (LCBA) www.londonbookarts.org is an artist-run studio providing education programmes for a wide community of users and access to resources for artists and designers. Its mission is to foster and promote book arts and artist-led publishing in the UK through collaboration, education, and by providing open-access to printing and bindery facilities.

Established at Britannia Works, Fish Island (London E3) in October 2012, LCBA was founded and is run by artists Simon Goode and Ira Yonemura. We met them in 2015 and early 2016 to talk about their experiences over the last three years, current projects and future plans. They are an example of purposeful, pragmatic idealism.

Visual forms of communication are dominant in the digital era. As the visual has increased in influence throughout contemporary culture, art & design slide collections, which would have traditionally helped users make sense of the visual world, have begun to rapidly disappear. How are students of art & design (and beyond) engaging with this visual proliferation now they can no longer rely on the support of the institutional slide collections and their expert staff?

The Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been an institution of record for artists' publications for the last forty years. Through its artists' books collection, the library has traced the various ways in which artists have used printed matter as an integral aspect of their practice. In the present context, as publishing now takes place in digital spheres of social media, personal websites and email correspondence as well as in print, the library must constantly reconsider how it “collects” across these media. The surprise of our current context is the degree that digital networks, image exchange, etc. are feeding into an increased output of printed artists’ books, magazines and little architecture and design publications. Such web-to-print artists’ books can be considered ‘hybrid’ publications that exist between online and offline spaces. Following Paul Soulellis, we argue that these artists ‘perform publishing’ by investigating multiple materialities and design possibilities as their works travel through the network. We situate web-to-print artists’ publishing in a historical context while offering a vocabulary for the new ways that artists are activating and appropriating, screen-grabbing and searching, the mass of verbal and visual information on the Internet. Notable web-to-print publications by Dexter Sinister, Paul Soulellis, Sabrina Fernandez Casas, David Horvitz and others illuminate the aesthetics and tactics of this genre. Finally, we propose that collaborations between art librarians and web archivists might adequately preserve these hybrid works.

The author gives context to the 1977 article ‘Arty choke: acquisition and ephemera’, and re-assesses his ideas with the perspective of a long career in librarianship and four decades of involvement with this and other library materials. He argues for a broad definition of ephemera and for art libraries to collect and make accessible as comprehensively as possible all designed visual artifacts potentially pertinent to the study of art history and the practices of art and design.

The use of wood engraving as a method of graphic reproduction for books, periodicals and newspapers continued for a surprisingly long time after the development of photographic methods. End-grain boxwood engraving was a truly Victorian phenomenon and an understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, versatility and limitations of this technique may perhaps best be reached through an exploration of its commercial decline. The period 1860–1900 saw a combination of competing technical, economic and aesthetic demands influencing the development of illustrative processes and eventually led to the end of commercial wood engraving. A form of engraving closer to Bewick's original interpretation of the craft re-emerged through the arts and crafts movement and the establishment of private presses during the inter-war period.