At the 2003 ARLIS/UK & Ireland Annual Conference, Creative partnerships, at the University of Sussex, a workshop entitled Documenting electronic resources: standards and challenges attracted delegates interested in exploring the practical and theoretical issues raised by cataloguing electronic resources in traditional library environments. This article further details recent changes made to the Anglo-American cataloguing rules to accommodate various types of e-resources. While quasi-established methods of representing such resources have undergone substantial revision, new metadata schemes are emerging and divisions between respective repositories containing different material types are disintegrating. Adapted or entirely new workflows for managing cataloguing of e-resources are under development (TrackER) and a fundamental restructuring of the very framework for relating data in bibliographic records to the needs of users (FRBR) may impact significantly on the representation of e-resources in library OPACs. Do these developments in any sense touch the library user whose ‘infosphere’ is underpinned by the seamlessness of Google’s PageRank algorithm and will the Research Libraries Group’s pilot service RedLightGreen sufficiently ‘Google-ize’ what libraries provide for these users?

The Union Catalog of Art Images (UCAI) is a research and development project located at the University of California, San Diego, and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first phase explored the barriers, both practical and theoretical, to creating a union catalogue and tackled problems such as the mapping of non-standardized metadata to a common record and the ingest of those records into a prototype union catalogue. Two of the biggest challenges were record clustering (using automated techniques to identify duplicate or closely-related records and bring them together), and working with hierarchical records (works and their surrogate images). The second phase, now under way and ending in mid-2005, will move the prototype union catalogue closer to production-level quality.

Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO) is a standards-based project developed under the auspices of the Visual Resources Association (VRA). CCO addresses the metadata needs of communities that work with a broad range of artistic or cultural works and associated images of those works. CCO provides guidelines for selecting, ordering and formatting descriptive data used to populate catalog records. This article gives the background to the project and the involvement of the user communities in the development of the guide, as well as describing future directions.

The Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland provides information on around 1250 buildings of architectural or historic merit that are considered to be at risk. Ranging from large baronial castles to small vernacular farmhouses, or from former factories to redundant churches, all represent considerable restoration opportunities. Established in 1990 by the Scottish Civic Trust on behalf of Historic Scotland, the Register was the first of its kind in the UK and is now emulated nationally. In April 2004, the Scottish Civic Trust embarked upon an exciting new chapter with the launch of www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk.

A research team within the Textiles Department at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology has since 2001 been involved in designing and realising an internet-based resource for textile students and staff at higher education institutions in the UK. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). Members of the team here provide an overview of the main issues involved in planning and implementing a digitisation project, discussing technical and design details and describing the construction of textile terminology relevant to design students.