At the 2009 Tate Triennial Nicolas Bourriaud declared that postmodernism was dead and that the world was now altermodern. Many papers have been written on the effects of postmodernity on libraries, yet three years on there has been little about the post-postmodern library. This short article, adapted from a Master’s dissertation, looks at whether the 21st-century library could be seen as an altermodern library. Recent changes at Bodleian Libraries are discussed to highlight how an altermodern paradigm could better fit today’s academic libraries.

What role does book illustration play in teaching book history, and how can libraries best support it? This article looks briefly at the lack of interest in book illustration as part of traditional historical bibliography and its increasing importance in the wider field of book history. Using the example of the London Rare Books School, an international summer school, it outlines the nature of the books needed and the extent to which a teaching collection may supply them. It further discusses how and why librarians and teaching staff can collaborate fruitfully to satisfy demand.

The Glasgow School of Art (established 1845) has a long history of collecting publications and artefacts to support its teaching of fine art, design and architecture. The School now owns a rich resource of historical material, spread across its library, archive and museum collections and overseen by its Learning Resources department. Can this material continue to support learning and teaching in the creative disciplines in the 21st century? And what are the potential benefits for students? Over the last five years Learning Resources staff have explored these questions and developed a programme of activities to promote knowledge of this material and understanding of its potential use in fine art, design and architecture education.

Love it or loathe it, digital is here to stay. This article explores the enormous effect that digital visual media and the ubiquity of the internet have had on the supply and delivery of images at higher education institutions, on both sides of the Atlantic. It observes the levels at which regulated digital visual resources have been adopted and looks at the problems inherent in rapidly evolving technology and the demands of the ‘millennials’ and ‘digital natives’. It also examines the barriers preventing a more fluid adoption of legal, good quality resources and the role that image specialists bring to the mix.

The establishment of the national image repository hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) at the University for the Creative Arts was an early pioneering effort in the 1990s to provide shared online access and preservation for digitised visual arts collections. Over the 15 years since the VADS image repository was first launched, and as the internet has rapidly expanded and transformed, the VADS team has also sought project funding to explore and address new themes and issues that have emerged within the arts education sector. Three of these recent collaborative endeavours are detailed in this article: the Kultur II Group which is supporting the development of institutional repositories in the arts; the Spot the Difference project which is researching the emergence and extent of a perceived ‘copy and paste’ culture; and the Look-Here! project, which has worked with ten partners to foster digitisation skills and strategies in the arts.

The number of North American art museums with a presence on the internet has more than doubled since 1999. This is not surprising given the power of new media to transform the experiences that museum visitors have with our cultural institutions. Every year museums attract thousands of visitors to view, both in person and online, their specialized collections and unique exhibitions. Developing in tandem with these resources and largely unfamiliar to the general, museum-going public, the libraries and archives of these institutions have contributed to the research mission, educational programming, documentary history, and curatorial functions of museums in countless ways. In addition, especially for art historians and other scholars, museum libraries and archives have been and continue to be increasingly valuable for primary and secondary sources, including artists’ correspondence, diaries, sketches, hard-to-find monographs, exhibition records and sales catalogues. What is unclear, however, is the extent to which resources in art museum libraries and archives are being documented, preserved and made accessible online. This research is perhaps the first of its kind to evaluate, on a small scale and during a span of twelve years, the web presence of 22 North American art museum libraries and archives.

Art information increasingly operates in a global environment, but does not have the benefit of a lingua franca which some other disciplines enjoy. Art information continues to be generated in a variety of vernacular languages, which limits cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Easy access to cheap, instantaneous and accurate translation would be the ideal but this is unlikely in the foreseeable future. A selection of online initiatives and tools is assessed in this article in an attempt to identify potential trends and opportunities.