The first art librarianship curricula were determined by the bibliographic requirements of scholarly libraries, until, the membership of ARLIS/NA revealed, in the 1970s, that programs with wider scope were needed. Today MSLS curricula for art librarians include core courses on general library topics; background courses in the humanities, archives and special collections, indexing and abstracting, and preservation; subject courses in art bibliography and visual resources; fieldwork and internships; and recommendations for institutional cognate courses in art history and museology. Qualifications emphasise subject specialisation of faculty and strong local art resources. Here curriculum objectives are enumerated, and the importance of co-ordination with related professional programs is stressed.

Those in charge of image collections in North America have found it difficult to agree upon standards for classifying and cataloguing their material, and many individual and incompatible systems have been developed. However there has been some recent progress in co-ordination, and this paper surveys some inter-institutional projects attempting to create standards, based on an awareness of user needs, primarily the Image Access Society, the Library of Congress list of subject headings for the Prints and Photographs Division, the Picture Division Thesaurus of the Public Archives of Canada and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus.

This paper is a continuation of a survey, “Subject indexing of visual resources: a survey”, published in Visual Resources: an International Journal of Documentation, Vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1980, pp.67-73.

The background and range of art libraries in the GDR are outlined, and a brief description of the holdings of major libraries given. Important bibliographic publications produced by libraries are noted, and an account of the activities of the organisation uniting art librarians in the GDR is provided. This paper was presented to the Art Libraries Section at the IFLA Conference, Leipzig, August 1981.

Identification of a visual image by computer may be achieved by ‘training’ the system to recognise examples within determined classification categories. Certain methods of achieving this have been made more feasible (particularly financially) by the advancement of silicon chip technology. This paper explains the underlying principles, with particular reference to the WISARD system developed at Brunei University, and proposes some possible applications to the classification and retrieval of art images.

A typical morning in a typical art college library is described. Ways in which art students use libraries, and the materials they require, are summarised. The fact that art students can get by without using libraries is noted in discussion of advantages and disadvantages of decentralised art libraries and of the centralisation of art library resources in libraries of wider scope. This paper was delivered to the course on ‘The Literature of Art and Architecture’, organised by ARLIS with the Library Association, in London on 6th December 1979.

In general terms, this paper is about the possibilities newly available to art historians, because of the new cheapness, of computing, and the problems which still exist in the areas of data and image storage, retrieval and display. First it tries to assess the technology from a layman’s point of view, then ventures into the contentious matter of how many art historians (in these days of reduced funding) are either able or willing to take advantage (if there are advantages) of new technology. Threading throughout the paper are doubts about whether the use of computers can or will advance the study of the subject (as opposed to making that study easier), and about whether the finance for some of the hardware mentioned could ever be raised by any non-scientific department.