As the underpinnings of High Modernism were everywhere being called into question in the 1950s and 1960s, the art world endeavoured to reinvent itself in new ways. For example, the view that meaning in art need not be embodied in static, timeless objects of supposedly universal significance was challenged by the idea of art as time-based, context-specific, or ephemeral. For artists, these changes offered a way to reformulate the art world system in accordance with their vision of what mattered, and thus to diminish the authority of big museums, commercial galleries, and glossy trade magazines, whose main function seemed to be the promotion of art not as a mode of critical inquiry, but as a luxury product for ‘Establishment’ elites.

As education and research institutions struggle to come to terms with networked resources, new kinds of organizations and partnerships are emerging to support the distribution of networked cultural heritage information. The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) provides an example of how museums have collaborated, in a manner that respects the requirements of education and research, to enhance access to the digital multimedia documenting their collections. AMICO has responded to librarians’ concerns about administration, economics, access and use in this new information environment, leveraging resources and - it is hoped - providing cost-effective, unprecedented access to cultural multimedia.

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) is one of four programs of the J. Paul Getty Trust, an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts, all of which reside at the Getty Center situated high on a beautiful hilltop in Brentwood, California. (The other programs of the Getty Trust are the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Grant Program.) From the beginning it was understood that the GRI would develop a research program in the discipline of art history and more generally the humanities, and that a library would support its work. Since its founding the GRI has, in fact, developed a major library as one of its programs alongside those for scholars, publications, exhibitions and a multitude of lectures, workshops and symposia for scholars, students and the general public. What is now known as the Research Library at the GRI has grown to be a significant resource and this article focuses on its history, the building that houses it, its collections and databases, and access to them all.

The library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris has recently conducted detailed research into the classification which will be used for the large amount of stock which will be on open access to its users. A working group was established which, after rejecting the idea of a specially created scheme, looked at what other systems were available, comparing those currently in use in the largest art and archaeology libraries in France and abroad. They also studied the two encyclopaedic classifications – Dewey and UDC. The final recommendation was adoption of the Library of Congress Classification and work to implement this decision is now under way.

Conceptual art is not, and was not, a ‘movement’, but more a broad area of activity which privileges the idea over the material and the sensory. The ideas, process or activities of artists were documented in the form of text, photography, sound recordings, film, written or typed instructions and publishing.

Because art institutions in The Netherlands all too often do not include library collections in their emergency response programs, ARLIS/NL decided to prepare guidelines for disaster planning in art libraries. These guidelines, now on the website of ARLIS/NL, serve as a tool in the process of disaster planning and can be customised to the individual situation of each library. This article describes the setting up of the project and its results.

This overview of the London Institute Library and Learning Resources website, the i page, focuses in particular on issues involved in selecting and evaluating high quality resources in an academic context. The article begins by detailing the philosophy, design and initial construction of the site, and gives an outline of the structure. The most heavily used section of the i page is the web guides and the evaluation criteria applied to web resources selected for inclusion are examined, with reference to the digital art web guide. The main criteria of content, structure, authority and subjectivity are looked at in detail. The process of user feedback is highlighted and, as the site is now over two years old, pertinent issues relating to its future growth and development are also discussed.

A wealth of primary documentation has been produced and collected by artists and artist-run organizations since the 1970s. Alternative art activities were often time-based and experimented with form and material, and documentation has become essential as a means to study and understand the intent, the actualization and the impact of artworks. What are the key issues for artists, archivists and researchers interested in the collection, preservation and provision of future access to the archives of the avant-garde?

The Union list of art, architecture and design serials, an online database of periodicals on fine and applied arts, film and television held by academic, public, national and special libraries throughout the UK and Ireland, has been some ten years in the making and work is still progressing. In autumn 2000 funding was obtained to allow for greater progress on this critical research tool, extending the coverage of participating libraries and enhancing the bibliographical records. However the work of increasing the level of participation in the Union list has largely been taken forward by direct approaches to individual institutions and by July 2002 there will be over 60 participating libraries as well as fuller bibliographic citations.

The Central Art Archives, founded in 1990 as a documentation and research institution within the Finnish National Gallery, have attempted to accept the challenges that contemporary art presents to archiving by realising extensive documentation projects covering conceptual, performance, land and environmental art in Finland. The corpus of documentary material includes photographs, slides, videos, interview transcripts, exhibition catalogues, etc. Currently the Central Art Archives is working together with the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma on a media art project.

A few of my favorite things is a description and explanation of artist-designed items collected over the past 20 years. The author, an artist, has a particular interest in simple objects that are very economically designed. Hundreds of such items have been collected over the past 20 years, including books, drawings, posters, invitations, prints, tickets, coins and multiples of all kinds. Eight favorite artist-designed items have been selected to illustrate the kinds of objects collected and the ways in which items find their way into the collection.

Exhibition and sales catalogues are notoriously hard to locate. This problem will be soon be alleviated in the UK by HOGARTH, a project to facilitate research access to the major collections in the history of art within the concept of the distributed national collection in the subject. A second benefit will be the creation of an electronic directory of collections of art history documentation in this country. The project is currently at halfway stage and this article outlines its background, its methodology, progress to date and future developments.