The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Renier Collection of Children’s Books provides a rich resource for research into book production as well as social history. Publishers’ cloth bindings have developed in a visually vibrant way that provides clues to the production dates of the books, as well as encouraging reflections on how they were marketed across the Victorian era and early 20th century. Questions also arise, such as, what was the relationship between the reader and cover? How did the cover designs reflect the times in which they were created? And, how different are our paperback era designs to those of the period when cloth was used?

Rarely does a research library travel. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, the Warburg family in Hamburg negotiated with British sponsors to enable the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Study) to find safe haven in London. An initial three-year agreement was followed by a seven-year arrangement and, at the end of 1944, with Europe still at war, the Warburg Institute was incorporated into the University of London. The story of the first eleven years in London – highly productive years in which the staff sought to pursue their original mission while assimilating into British academe – reveals the working of complex politics and shows the degree to which, early on, the fate of the Warburg Institute was linked to that of the newly founded Courtauld Institute of Art.

Is it, should it be, the responsibility of an art librarian to document and collect ‘the now’? There are obvious pros and cons of this – the inevitable value-judgments, the expensive errors of unnecessary acquisition or omission, the labour involved, deviation from the institutional mission, etc. The author explores a personal journey through the acquisition of artists’ books and multiples, defending a role for the art librarian in the interstices of curatorship and the art world as it actually happens.

Created by Aby Warburg as a tool for his research and as a counterpart to his collection of books, the Bildersammlung (image collection) acquired its first subject-based system in the late 1920s. This system was structured according to four binomial theme-motif pairings of key concepts. In January 1933, following the Warburg’s move to London, the books and the image collection were organised according to an iconographic classification system that still makes it unique. While the importance of photographs in the research process was part of the cultural inheritance transferred to the UK, the question of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, as a corpus, has received little attention. The original, subsequently disregarded plan for the Bildersammlung, together with other documents, may shed some light on this question.

In 1989, the Japan Art Documentation Society (JADS) was born, with inspiration received from members of overseas art library organisations – ARLIS/UK and Ireland, ARLIS/NA, ARLIS/ANZ and others – who attended the 52nd General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in Tokyo in 1986. However, JADS was very definitely JADS: it did not try to become ARLIS/Japan. What reasoning lay behind the choice of the society’s name? And after its establishment what path did JADS follow: what role did it take on for itself as the framework for joint projects in the art library community in Japan? What were the activities that it aimed to provide to enhance collaboration between museums, libraries and archives? Focussing mainly on the growing interest in Japan in recent years in creating networks between museums, libraries and archives, and on the opening in 2004 of the Art Libraries’ Consortium (ALC), a union catalogue of art libraries based in the Tokyo metropolitan area which has been steadily expanding, this article gives a chronological overview of the developments that have taken place in art libraries and art documentation in Japan from 1986 to 2012.

Network has become a much used term in modernist studies, but what is a network and what does it tell us about a periodical? A network is a series of connections, the study of which reveals not only the modes of production, readership and social and political niches of journals, but also the constituent elements of their aesthetic discourse. This article explores the biographical, commercial and institutional connections of three periodicals at the beginning of the 20th century – the Art Journal, Connoisseur and Burlington Magazine – within the year 1903. Their different approaches to art historical analysis are also examined, not as abstract philosophies unbounded by constraints of time or context, but interpreted as texts originating from a specific and shifting history, in which the relationship with the art market emerges as crucial.

The term ‘livres d’artistes’ hides from view creative artworks, whose presence in special library collections is justified by their artistic and literary value but also by their value as witness of their times. After defining the content of these collections, this article analyses the way ‘livres d’artistes’ are managed. Because they are different from all other books, they struggle to find their public. Active promotion is thus an essential step in making them properly influential.

In the past few years, several new publications and exhibitions have presented surveys of the genre of artists’ magazines. This recent research has explored the publication histories of individual titles and articulated the significance of this genre within contemporary art history. Millennium magazines was a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that traced the artists’ magazine into the 21st century. The organizers, Rachael Morrison and David Senior of MoMA Library, assembled a selection of 115 international tides published since 2000 for visitors to browse during the run of the exhibition and created a website as a continuing resource for information about the selected tides. The exhibition served as an introduction to the medium for new audiences and a summary of the active community of international artists, designers and publishers that still utilize the format in innovative ways. As these projects experiment with both print and digital media in their production and distribution of content, art libraries are faced with new challenges in digital preservation in order to continue to document experimental publishing practices in contemporary art and design.

Otto Kurz was justly renowned on three accounts, as a scholar, a librarian and a human being. His publications and lectures ranged from ancient and medieval Near Eastern art and culture to Italian baroque painting; he built up the internationally renowned library of the Warburg Institute after the war and, as a human being, he was a role model to those who knew him, devotedly dedicated to his family in difficult circumstances and generously helpful to all.

In Japan, many different organisations have played a part in creating the digital content that we now see being shared on the internet. Starting in the 1980s, developments in digital cultural heritage took place mainly in five kinds of institution: museums, libraries, archives, university and research institutes, plus the world of business. Museums and libraries played a leading role in the 1980s, and they were joined in the 1990s by universities and commercial enterprises, which developed digital content in a variety of ways. In the 2000s archival institutions became involved, and museums, libraries and archives began to form networks to enable seamless retrieval of digital cultural heritage. In the 2010s, the focus moved to the sharing of data and specifically the need to establish a common approach for the exchange of metadata for the ‘Semantic Web’. Creating content for tablet devices also became important, as did the question of standardising technology. The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 brought a keen awareness of the need to create digital records to preserve and share memories of disasters.

The Musashino Art University Museum & Library is run in a unique way that has allowed it to function as library and museum in one, ever since its inception. The contents of the digital archives being created at this 50-year-old, multifunctional museum and library are highly diverse, ranging from rare books, held in the library, to design collections, visual resources, and material on folk art, held in the art museum. Together with the University’s Research Center for Art and Design, the Museum & Library is currently creating an integrated database of its holdings, and digitising its archive collections. The aim is to offer multifaceted information networks that can be interrogated simultaneously for all intellectual information relating to specific artists or artworks as well as to the art collection of the museum. The common challenge in creating these digital archives is the systematisation, sharing and visualisation of a multiplicity of research resources.

The Tate Library holds an extensive collection of print ephemera that includes private invitation cards, press releases, postcards, and promotional material from artists and galleries. In 2006, library staff began to notice a trend for an increasing amount of born-digital ephemera, circulated via email and vulnerable to loss, deletion and disintegration. In 2011, they undertook an internal research project to develop a strategy for collecting, storing and providing access to born-digital ephemera. As the creation and dissemination of electronic ephemera continues to grow rapidly, we need to ask how we can bridge the gap in our technical knowledge and apply current digital preservation research to our library collections. How can we establish a low-cost working best practice for collection, storage and access? And is there future potential to create external partnerships with other institutions facing the same issues?

Half a century after the 1960s, commonly considered to have been the period when artists’ publications expanded and consolidated, this genre seems to be experiencing a new ‘golden age’. In recent years, the number of books and printed matter produced by artists has grown exponentially, and so has the interest in them demonstrated by exhibition curators, public and private collectors, and even the media. The contemporary art scene in Spain is not immune to this phenomenon. On the contrary, over the last decade, artists’ publishing has undergone an explosion in quantity, quality and impact with no precedents in Spanish art history. The causes for such an explosion and its main traits are explored here, focusing on a number of significant examples and protagonists. Relevant sources of information documenting its course are offered, both online and in print.

When Ulrich Middeldorf departed Florence in November 1935 to teach art history at the University of Chicago, he left behind at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz the ‘Photo collection – the special pride of our Institute’ in the structure that has characterised it up to the present day. Middeldorf was 25 when he first came to the Institute as a scholar. In the following years he turned the Photothek into a modern research instrument, re-organising its classification system and its card indexes as the main finding aid. His contribution to the growth of the collection was enormous, not only thanks to his own donations, but also through the relationship he fostered with the main patron of the collection, Luigi Vittorio Fossati Bellani.