Although official censorship in the Soviet Union ceased over ten years ago, the effects in art and art libraries are still felt. Censored books were marked with a hexagon and relegated to closed stacks, which for many years were off limits to the public and library staff alike. Some of the banned material in the All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature is analysed here in an attempt to establish the reason why certain items were seen by the authorities as too harmful to be acceptable for general circulation. The fate of the second “enemy” perceived by the Soviet censors, the original works of art and architecture, is also described.

Local government re-organisation, educational changes and increasing costs of materials are just some of the external threats faced by UK public libraries. Internally the threats come chiefly from the need for financial savings, but they can come from our own unwillingness to make change. However it is an exciting time, with new initiatives coming from government particularly in the areas of educational development and information technology, and opportunities for greater cohesion in planning and management. All these provide challenges for librarians in the visual arts.

Les bibliothèques publiques, en France, connaissent un essor sans précédent: en 25 ans (1972-96), on a construit 1.400.000m2 de locaux pour les bibliothèques municipales (de 355.000 à 1.719.000 m2); le personnel est passé de 3.000 emplois à 17.000; le nombre des usagers inscrits a augmenté de 1.182.000 à 6.449.000. Pour autant, la situation n’engendre pas un optimisme sans nuance. Deux éléments font que les bibliothécaires, et leurs tutelles, ont des questions, des interrogations, des inquiétudes: d’une part, l’identité de la bibliothèque, qui, du fait de son histoire, est complexe et, aujourd’hui, de plus en plus incertaine; d’autre part, les évolutions économiques, techniques et politiques qui créent des tensions grandissantes entre la demande de bibliothèque et l’offre de bibliothèque.

Public libraries in France are experiencing unprecedented growth: in 25 years (1971-1996) 1,400,000 m of accommodation has been constructed for municipal libraries (an increase from 355,000 m to 1,719,000 m2); staffing has grown from 3,000 employees to 17,000; the number of registered users has risen from 1,182,000 to 6,449,000. For all that, the situation does not give rise to unquestioning optimism. Two concerns exercise librarians and their governing bodies: on one hand the identity of the library, historically complex and currently more and more unsettled; on the other hand economic, technical and political developments which are creating growing tensions between the demands made on libraries and what they can actually supply.

Since its foundation by Frits Lugt the Fondation Custodia/Institut Néerlandais has been a well-known institution on the Paris scene. It is one of many foreign cultural institutes in Paris, some of which - and specifically their libraries - are described in this article. The unique character of the Dutch library is highlighted, as well as the way in which it is adapting to new techniques. Of particular interest are the plans for the development of special links with other art libraries, such as the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris and the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in the Hague.

Co-operative efforts are being made to improve access to the large number of publications held in Dutch libraries specialising in the history of art. These include the PICA/NCC system run by the universities and the Royal Library, and the CD-ROM being produced by museum and other libraries which do not take part in PICA but which hold especially strong collections of exhibition and auction catalogues. The opening up of these collections on the Internet and on disk is expected to result in an increase in the number of students using museum libraries. Their role will inevitably change and this will have consequences for their own organisations, as is illustrated here by the current situation of the library of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Many problems beset early digital interactive publishing on videodiscs and LaserDiscs, while the rapid development of the Internet, technically and in terms of user base, has in most fields now supplanted the CD-ROM. The future for off-line digital resources in the cultural field will depend on one hand on the success of the current (very slow) launch of DVD with its greatly increased storage capacity compared with CD-ROM and, on the other hand, on the widening and cheapening of Internet bandwidth. And the launch of high definition digital television will almost certainly change everything yet again.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is a partner in the Electronic Library Image Service for Europe (ELISE) project, which is part-funded by the European Community. ELISE I began in 1993 and was completed in 1995. The V&A’s National Art Library is particularly involved in the second phase of the project, ELISE II, which began in 1996 and is due to finish in 1999. This paper explains the background to ELISE and considers the implications for the V&A and the wider art and design community.

Aquarelle is a flagship project developing the Information Network on Cultural Heritage, funded under the European Commission’s Telematics Applications Programme. It has created a distributed multimedia information system, offering access to interrelated multimedia reference documents and primary data that describe the cultural heritage of Europe. It aims to create the technology to enable a service which would provide uniform access to the varied collections of data held by museums, art galleries and other cultural organisations throughout Europe.

The Corporation of London (the local authority for the City) recently launched COLLAGE, a powerful custom-designed visual information system, whose aim is to transform public accessibility to the extensive visual collections held in its libraries and galleries. Over a period of eighteen months a dedicated team of staff photographed, digitised and indexed over 30,000 works of art as the result of an intensive data imaging project. So far the works are drawn from the Guildhall Library and Guildhall Art Gallery - collections particularly renowned for their strength in material relating to London, which is now widely and easily accessible on dedicated workstations in the City, as well as via the Internet.