One enormous problem confronting visual resources (VR) collections internationally is the time, labor and expense of converting or creating digital collections while maintaining and even adding to the analog collection. It will take considerable time to reach the critical digital mass that will begin to reflect the richness already available in our analog collections. The analog collections must be maintained in tandem with the digital development. As one might logically conclude, this is twice the work. It is improbable that any of us will see our staffs doubling. This underscores the need to define clear goals for digital collection development that are reasonable given the level of staffing and the need for continuation of analog services for the foreseeable future. This conundrum may have an up side in that it will tend to encourage resource sharing and consortial development of digital resources.

For many years slide libraries in higher education institutions in the UK grew steadily in size as they accommodated the needs of new and expanding art and design courses. Although some slide librarians acquired new slides by photographing works of art in museums and art galleries, and most bought slides of the traditional art history canon from commercial publishers and art galleries, the largest proportion of these ever growing slide collections was made up of slides produced by copy photography, using slide film to photograph images taken from books, journals and exhibition catalogues. Changes in UK copyright law in 1988 made this illegal and jeopardised the ability of lecturers to present the visual material they needed for their courses. Slide librarians were forced to consider ways of getting around the law. A licence scheme ultimately emerged as the answer, but one that has its detractors and critics.

A previous article by this author discussed an emerging phenomenon on the Internet. That is, how the law, by denying copyright protection to certain kinds of digital works, may have restricted access to such works instead of liberating them, as was initially intended by the judiciary. This absurd conclusion has resulted from owners whose works are no longer protected by copyright law, who have resorted to restrictive contractual provisions on-line to control access and use of their works. And in turn, owners of such content are still able to generate revenue by charging a subscription fee for the right to gain access to the information contained therein. The result is particularly troubling to end users of digital content. If copyright law is no longer applicable, then what of the Fair Use/Fair Dealing defences available to users of these works? Does this mean that these defences are not applicable either? Are users of such content completely at the mercy of the owners’ terms and conditions of use as dictated by click-on agreements and Rules of Use posted on Web sites? This article discusses the application of Fair Dealing and Fair Use to Internet-based works, by examining the legislative and judicial responses to the ambiguities in their intellectual property protection which new technologies create.

The Internet is making the world a much smaller place and when it comes to digital goods – products that can be reduced to a series of zeros and ones and squirt down a wire – there are no international borders. One question often asked in relation to the Internet and copyright law is whether there should be a single international copyright law. Is this likely in the near future?

Trade cards and other trade resources in the John Johnson Collection form the theme of the forthcoming Bodleian exhibition (October 1st to Christmas 2001). In parallel with this, the trade cards have been catalogued and digitised. After a brief introduction to the John Johnson Collection and existing finding aids, this article discusses the usefulness of trade cards as a resource and the multiple access points provided by detailed cataloguing, which enable us to establish new correlations between trades.

The main aims of the Museo imaginado project are to create a virtual museum of Spanish paintings held outside Spain, and a virtual special documentation centre on this topic, as a focus for other studies and research tools. Most of the important museums in the world contain masterpieces by Spanish painters and our target is to collect them together in a database which records their history, their provenance and the travels and trials they have undergone before arriving at their present destination. Today, the meeting up of technological skills and art history research has made it possible for us to make this information available to the public and to the academic world.