Based on the acceptance of a future of continuing and accelerating change, this paper looks at the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental issues which impact on us as art librarians, and looks back to see what lessons might be learned to help us deal with a future we cannot predict with any certainty.

For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library’s existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, ‘boutique’ digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th-century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian’s collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the Project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15 th century.

Rubbish for the waste-paper basket or valuable social documents? What is printed ephemera and what can it reveal to us about the everyday lives of people in the past? This brief introduction to the subject goes some way to answer these questions, and poses others.

What is ephemera? How do we catalogue it? Every library’s ephemera collection differs greatly from others in its content and cataloguing needs. Does one dictate the other? Is there a right way and a wrong way? Or just a way that is right for the library and material in hand? A look at how these things were approached at the Wellcome Library gives an example of how a successfully ordered collection can be created out of the initial chaos with just a little forethought and a lot of hard work.

The current information environment presents opportunities for sharing information and enhancing the public domain of creative resources for education, research and the public good. Because the sharing paradigm for digital resources is fundamentally different from any we experienced in the analog world, practices of non-profit cultural heritage collecting institutions should be re-examined and re-evaluated with respect to aligning mission with new opportunities. One practice that deserves attention, particularly in this new environment, is the continued assertion of intellectual property rights in images of creative works that are themselves in the public domain.

Mergers and re-organisations within the world of art institutions have a substantial impact on art libraries, their collections and their services. Development of such combined libraries has been from small units with in-depth knowledge within a limited subject field towards a broader, more general approach to knowledge, comprising a wider variety of subjects and tasks. What impact has this had on art libraries, their parent institutions and their users and staff?

The London Library, an independent subscription lending library and registered educational charity, has been providing a wide selection of books for loan to members in all aspects of the humanities since 1841. Books and periodicals on applied art and the history of art, in all the major European languages, form an increasingly important part of its collections. The Library is embarking on a period of extension and development, and welcomes new members.

The Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels (ZADIK = Central Archive of the International Art Trade) was established in 1992 by the Bundesverband Deutscher Galerien (BVDG), the association of German art dealers, and is the only research archive in the world that specialises in collecting and preserving documents and information from the art market. The history, purpose, collection profile and work of this still very young art archive is described here.

How can the many and various members of the arts education community get the digital images they need, in a world where intellectual property rights issues, lack of co-ordination, poor quality, erratic standards and insubstantial support are the norm? Perhaps we should think about whether we focus too much on the technology in Information Communication Technology. Are we guilty of flooding the internet with innovative new products instead of facing up to the fact that most of the issues in finding digital images are to do with people processes: informing and communicating?

Looking after ephemera collections can seem quite daunting; their contents come in all shapes and sizes and they are designed to be ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. The definition of ephemera in the Oxford pocket dictionary is ‘things of only short-lived use’, which is disheartening when we are trying to preserve these fascinating items for posterity. However, there is a lot of information available about preservation and much of this is applicable to ephemera collections.

As we all cope with an e-everything world, libraries are moving to accommodate WOW (words on the web) as well as POP (print on paper) in their collections. This has led to a realignment in organisational structures, particularly in university contexts. This paper addressed two major issues: firstly the challenges that major institutional reorganisations in Australia have placed on universities and, in particular, on art schools; secondly the way these challenges may be met, based on actions and solutions to improve access to Australian visual arts information resources which followed from an extensive survey by the National Library of Australia in co-operation with ARLIS/ANZ. These results encourage art libraries to develop partnerships and networking with their parent institution and other libraries and cultural institutions on a national level.

Labels, packaging, bills, colour prints, blotters, fans, trade cards, publicity leaflets, social stationery, pious images, good-points cards, wrapping paper, golden crowns from Galettes des Rois . . . Far from being complete, this list gives just a glimpse of the iconographic collections of the Bibliothèque Forney. Alongside the prestigious collections that have always been part of the history of the institution (posters, wallpaper, printed fabrics, ancient books), the Library has in fact long been developing a collection of ephemera. These can be counted in hundreds of thousands of items, but it is difficult to be more precise; the ephemera collections grow daily, often as a result of small donations, and remarkable acquisitions enrich the collections.

The longer you ignore those boxes – of letters, diaries, papers, photographs, tapes – that are under your desk, in your closet, stashed in your storage room, the greater the danger of losing valuable history forever. This is the true tale of how one small non-profit arts organization saved an oral history of American art that was on the verge of, quite literally, fading into oblivion.

The British Library, the UK’s national library, has often been described as a ‘hidden treasure’, with a huge amount of material and expertise which could support the creative sector, including graphic design, product design, the performing arts and fashion. During a recent visit Zandra Rhodes, the renowned fashion designer, called the Library a ‘Pandora’s Box’.

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.