History of Design is a very new discipline and there are many problems associated with defining the boundaries of the subject and developing the appropriate methodologies for research and teaching purposes. One of the major problems facing historians of design, and students, is the location and availability of source material, and it is in order to help librarians help those faced with this problem that this composite article has been written. The contributors are all members of the recently formed Design History Research Group.

Art libraries differ from other academic libraries in their stock provision and in the way they are used. The disadvantages of multi-site libraries are outweighed by the difficulties of fitting the art library into a large central library, and by the advantages to the user of co-ordinated decentralisation. The implications for art libraries of centralised cataloguing systems require careful consideration; other problems include staff structures, the use (and abuse) of quantification, and the degree and type of user education. (Text of a paper presented to the course for senior art librarians on ‘Managing the Arts’, organised by ARLIS and the Polytechnic of North London in December).

Growing from modest beginnings in 1898, the collection was reorganised after the Second World War and now totals more than half a million slides. These are listed in a catalogue on site and in printed catalogues and lists which are available to libraries and individuals; slides are retrieved by accession number from electrically-operated storage units. Slides may be borrowed free of charge, in person or by post, by any resident of the United Kingdom.

It has seemed to me for some time that one of my preoccupations was really only a hobby-horse, in the sense that Laurence Sterne describes that of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, for it has seemed to be of ‘great singularity’ as if I ‘might have travelled from York to Dover, — from Dover to Penzance in Cornwall, and from Penzance to York back again, and not have seen such another upon the road’. I am thinking of my preoccupation with what I identified as the need for a library, or libraries, in Britain, devoted to contemporary art, and open to the public. I aired the idea in Studio International in May 1973, but received no feedback.

Rather than developing its stock as a status symbol, the library at Falmouth School of Art aims to contribute actively to students’ continuing education by supporting and stimulating the whole spectrum of their activities, and by teaching the value of the printed word and ‘how to look things up’.

The booklet publications of the Golgonooza Press, which takes its name and sign from the work of William Blake, aim to combat art decadence and the vested interests of mass-art-publishing. One end of the ‘main axis of thought’ on which the Press’s editorial initiative turns, reaches to cultures other than that of the modern West. The other ‘rightfully belongs in the hearts and hands’ of creative artists for whom art remains ‘a channel of Grace’.

Art libraries, guided in part by unquestioned assumptions and market forces, tend to buy the same books while neglecting ‘ephemeral’ primary material which can often be acquired cheaply, which will be vital data for future historians, and which is likely to inspire artists then as it does now. Collections of ephemera invariably attract donations, research, and recognition. Reliance on books to document this material means accepting a selective and perhaps misleading view, at second hand, after a lapse of time. Reassessment of the significance of the images and artefacts thrown-up by our culture by means of printing and other mass-production techniques, might lead to the cooperative, rationalised acquisition, by art libraries, of both books and ephemera, and to the exploitation of the latter by inter-library lending of original material or of slides.

Sometimes I wonder if I am in the right society.

Just after the inauguration of ARLIS, when I was still thinking about joining, there appeared in the ARLIS Newsletter (nos. 2 and 4) two short articles which suggested to me the sort of society ARLIS might become. Written by Frank Hatt, they were called ‘Is your toolkit really necessary?’ and ‘Toolkits again’. The author took the information needs of library users to be the art librarian’s first priority; he dismissed a good many bibliographical tools in our field and called for investigation by ARLIS into exactly what the needs of users of art libraries are. He was thinking on the lines of a cooperative user research project based on case studies, presumably to be published in the Newsletter.

The Archive of ICOGRADA, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, provides a reference centre and a hire service based on a collection of original examples of graphic design, slides, films, and recordings of lectures on design. The Archive is housed at Bolton College of Art and Design, Lancashire.

A personal choice of European and American booksellers who specialise in out-of-print material on the fine and applied arts.

The Times Literary Supplement on March 21st 1975 printed an article by you entitled ‘Fashions in fashion history’. Subsequently you have said that your aim in publishing that piece was ‘to try to persuade publishers to put out some useful material’, such as annotated transcriptions of important inventories listing items of dress, and a series of books dealing with changes in fashion in particular places at particular times. What do you see as the major gaps in the literature of fashion at the present time?