Legislation in South Africa now provides for the inclusion of arts and culture and adult literacy in the education system and art libraries can help promote this Government initiative by distributing their resources widely. The Library of the South African National Gallery is playing an unusual and non-traditional role in helping redress past inequities. It uses visual art, with its concern with expression and communication, to encourage adult learning and stimulate articulacy by encouraging learners to ‘read’ texts from the mass media and visual artworks in order to develop skills in all kinds of literacy. SANG’s project shows how language and artworks can be linked together productively, contributing to the basic education and training of adults.

The Royal Library, Copenhagen has made many attempts over the years to organise the huge collection of photographs held in its Department of Maps, Prints and Photographs into a formal museum of photography. Finally in 1996 the Royal Library created such a museum, and named it ‘The National Museum of Photography’. This museum within a library will be located in the new building at the City’s harbour front called The Black Diamond. The displays will show new as well as older photography from the collection, which is important both artistically and historically. Digitisation and cataloguing of the collection are under way, and the first couple of thousand items are already available to a wider public on the Internet.

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.

In 1997 the German art libraries magazine, AKMB-news: Informationen zu Kunst, Museum und Bibliothek, began a series of collaborations with contemporary artists, who provide original visual or conceptual contributions for some issues of the journal. The artists’ work refers mostly to the context of museums and libraries.

It is surprising, in view of the international interest in Scandinavian design, to find that studying this subject on a scholarly level is not at all widespread in the Nordic countries. To increase the amount of research in this field scholars need to be able to publish and get feedback, both from editors and translators and from colleagues. Awareness of this need led to the founding of the annual Scandinavian Journal of Design History seven years ago, which publishes scholarly articles in English, written by Nordic scholars on all topics, and by those abroad on Scandinavian Design. The author’s work on this journal has been complemented by her role as Librarian of the Danish Museum of Decorative Art, which for the last 100 years has been responsible for collecting and preserving Danish decorative art and design documentation. During the last 10 to 15 years the development of design and of design history has brought about a re-evaluation of the criteria for information retrieval. And this has also focussed attention on the problem of proper terminology in this relatively new field – in Danish, but also in other Scandinavian languages – and on the search for exact equivalents in English.

This survey of the achievements of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and its Art and Architecture Group shows the effectiveness of a collaborative approach in developing best practices and standards, and implementing new methodologies and technologies, to benefit the international art library and research communities. RLG members in Europe, North America and Australia include many of the major art research libraries. RLG offers services such as the RLIN bibliographic database and the MARCADIA retrospective conversion service in conjunction with projects documenting sales catalogue records (SCIPIO), preserving serials (the Art Serials Preservation Project) and facilitating the interloan of material between members. More recently the partnership between the RLG and the Getty Information Institute has made available an enormous range of art documentation work carried out by the Getty: standards and authority control work such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artists’ Names and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names. In the 1980s the RLG conducted a survey identifying information needs in the humanities, which has led to resources such as the Bibliography of the History of Art becoming widely accessible, with the Provenance Index to follow shortly. This partnership is now active in the museum field, attempting to bridge the gap between the domains of secondary and primary materials in the field of art research. The REACH project (Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage) is experimenting with the export of existing machine-readable data from heterogeneous museum collection systems, and testing the feasibility of designing a common interface for access which will complement RLG’s other resources.