The year the Olympic Games were forced to halt international sportsmanship to include a horrifying entre’act of international bloodshed. A year of political schizophrenia in the United States, in which the largest popular vote ever was accorded to the man who was to be at the epicenter of the most profound national scandal in U.S. history. The sort of year which makes newspaper editors happy, and fills the rest of us with morbid fascination. It is not surprising, therefore, that the founding of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) is not the event that most people associate with the year 1972. And yet, the organisation grew and was shaped in the intervening decade by circumstances not only within the relatively narrow spectrum of professional art librarianship and visual curatorship, but within the larger contexts of sociological and technological circumstances, and within the art and library worlds of which it is a part.