Introduced in 1947 as an event during Charities Week, the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) Fashion Show provided an opportunity to present student designs and fundraise around the City of Glasgow. Over the years, the format, location and emphasis of the event have changed, although creativity, collaboration, team working and the Students Union remain central to organization. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the fashion show, the development of this event has recently been re-visited and an exhibition developed. This project posed the questions: What GSA Archives and Collections’ holdings relate to the event? Are there gaps within the collection and if so can items be accessioned? What can be understood about the evolution of the GSA fashion show from this material? Is there potential for further research from this local event? These questions form the basis of this article.

Information Competencies for Students in Design Disciplines compiled, for the first time in the US, a list of core information literacy skills for design students. Divided into basic, intermediate, and advanced skills in each design discipline, it helped to define and delimit information literacy skills in these subjects, and were intended to facilitate a systematic means of integrating information literacy skills into the core curriculum of design courses. Closely related to the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, Information Competencies were written by a group of art and design librarians (Jeanne Brown, Jane Carlin, Thomas Caswell, Edith Crowe, Maya Gervits, Susan Lewis, Alan Michelson, Barbara Opar and Jennifer Parker) and published by ARLIS/NA in 2006 (rev. 2007). This article is personal reflection by one of its authors on its legacy ten years after publication.

Fashion magazines contain hidden delights ripe for investigating. One can explore overt content and covert messages in fashion magazine advertising art by probing the periodical and its promotional images for historical or social clues and for the advertiser's manipulative methods. Art librarians can apply and encourage the use of analytical techniques in connection with fashion advertising art from any era or region of the world. The focus here is on a single firm, the Demorest Fashion and Sewing-Machine Company, best known for its paper sewing patterns, and how in a single volume of its monthly magazine it promoted the purchase of fashion goods in connection with a world's fair: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Comparing a 19th-century fashion engraving with a related photograph; and viewing a magazine advertisement as a set of repeating patterns according to a 21st-century process, fractal-concept analysis, together yield a trove of information and prompt further ideas for alternate and peripheral lines of inquiry.

Teaching and learning visual literacy within art and design librarianship presents several unique challenges. Librarians are better equipped than ever to meet these challenges with the help of ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, which provides an exciting opportunity to situate visual literacy within the contextual definition of information literacy for art and design students. In mapping these two documents together the author found several ways to address the more critical components of information and visual literacy in more nuanced and meaningful ways. While art librarians have often addressed visual literacy needs to varying degrees and in creative and practical ways, a more systematic approach is needed as we move forward.

Although many fashion archives find it challenging to accurately represent their collections in a digital format, the task the Yorkshire Fashion Archive faced when creating their first electronic catalogue was uniquely difficult, as their collection spans far more than garments. As an archive that aims to represent socio-cultural history through clothing, it also collects oral histories, personal photographs and ephemera related to the garments from the original owners. While putting this information together into one digital record presented challenges, this also provided opportunities preserve the remembered history of the fashionable history of the Yorkshire region, alongside the objects and ephemera in the collection, to create a textually rich electronic archive.

The Herbert Sondheim, Inc. scrapbooks in the New School Archives and Special Collections document the activities of a notable early to mid-20th-century New York-based manufacturer of ready-to-wear women's fashions. A precursor to the contemporary fast fashion industry, Sondheim's employees sketched and kept detailed notes on materials and construction of garments produced by Parisian designers, which the firm then adapted into more affordable and easily obtainable apparel for American consumers. A retrospective visual materials cataloguing project resulting from a graduate student's interest in the collection led to the online availability of over 1200 sketches of fashion adaptations and challenged archives staff to develop appropriate descriptive metadata for a fragmented, ambiguous and complex documentary record.

The Art of Costume Design: The Work of Dunya Ramicova is an on-going project by the University of California, Merced Library to digitize, preserve, and promote the work of costume designer and UC Merced Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Dunya Ramicova. This article talks about the collection itself and the various projects undertaken in support of its preservation and promotion.

In the last third of the 19th century, Berlin was the undisputed capital of the German clothing and fashion industry on an international scale. Several publishing houses specialized in the production of fashion magazines for different target groups. One of the success stories in this context is that of the publisher Franz Lipperheide and his wife Frieda. In 1865, they founded their own company, publishing the journal Die Modenwelt: Illustrirte Zeitung für Toilette und Handarbeiten. This journal quickly became the most-read fashion journal in Berlin. By the company's 25th anniversary in 1890, a total of 12 international editions of the journal was published with around 500,000 subscribers. The economic success of their company allowed the Lipperheides to create extensive private collections that reflected their deep interest in cultural-historical topics as well as textile art.

This paper focuses on their collection of source material for costume studies, which is now known as the ‘Sammlung Modebild—Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek’ (Fashion Image Collection—Lipperheide Costume Library), a department of the Kunstbibliothek at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The paper presents its history, some collection highlights and the various means of access (catalogues, exhibition catalogues and online access).

The origins and history of Visual literacy (VL) are summarized in this article, from the 1960s writings of John L. Debes, Marshall McLuhan and others of the Rochester School, to the influence of the Internet in the 2000s. ERIC and Google Scholar searches are used to analyse the evolution of its literature over time.

In 2011, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc purchased a fashion photography archive with over 750,000 images from runway photographer Niall McInerney, with the aim of digitizing it for the educational market. The archive spans the period from the late 1970s through to 2000, before the rise of digital photography. It includes many rare images – backstage and street style as well as runway. Bloomsbury recently completed the three-and-a-half-year digitization project, and is in the process of indexing the images for digital deployment as part of Bloomsbury Fashion Central, which will also include the Berg Fashion Library and Fairchild Books content. This article looks at the drivers behind the purchase of the archive, the challenges it presented and the logic of partnerships with other possible content providers.

University College London (UCL) Library Services holds extensive Special Collections that are employed in various teaching and public engagement activities. Students and academic staff at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art have the opportunity to participate in the Slade Small Press Project that uses the UCL Small Press Collections as inspiration, recognising the current trend for printed material and text as a visual medium. UCL's BASc students, and participants at library public events focused on non-creative subjects, study ways in which the physical aspects of rare books contribute to understanding the text, with surprisingly creative outputs. While museums have recently adopted Object Based Learning (OBL) as a teaching strategy, this form of learning has long been familiar in libraries, particularly for special collections. However as readers increasingly access library text digitally, and perceive text as unaffected by medium, they are losing the skills to interpret physical books and printed material (skills we term ‘object literacy’), making OBL approaches more important than ever for library staff. In keeping with the UCL 2034 strategy, the Connected Curriculum encourages participation in research at all levels of study and OBL methods enable interdisciplinary enquiry and collaborative practices.

The Centre for Fashion Studies was established at Stockholm University in Sweden, in July 2006 through a generous donation from the Erling Persson Family Foundation, connected to clothing manufacturer H&M.

Fashion Studies at Stockholm University is an independent, theoretical discipline with an interdisciplinary approach looking at the past, present and future, and it includes different areas of critical discourse within the humanities and social sciences. Stockholm University Library plays a key role in research and education conducted at the university, and the library works in close collaboration with all disciplines to provide adequate support to researchers and students in a rapidly changing information society. In this article I will focus on and describe the process of acquiring fashion literature at Stockholm University Library from 2006–2013.

A case study concerning the in-house digitization of a small collection of Central Saint Martins graduate fashion shows. The background of the collection is outlined (VHS and DVD recordings spanning from 1979 to present), as well as the workflow put in place to deal with the technical aspects of recording, cataloguing, processing and archiving an audio-visual collection with minimal budget and staffing.

At the University of the Arts London (UAL), Library Services and the University's educational development department have collaborated to ensure that teaching and learning development for its librarians is approached strategically and can be linked directly to the institutional teaching, learning and enhancement strategy. In doing so the librarians at UAL are provided with opportunities to develop pedagogic skills and techniques which acknowledge the arts education environment in which they are working and some of the specific differences which need to be considered when teaching art and design students. This paper presents some of the approaches and initiatives that have been deployed to achieve this.