En août 2008, 47 bibliothécaires en art de 11 pays différents ont participé à Montréal (Québec) au congrès préliminaire de l’IFLA 2008 axé sur le thème « Documentation sur l’art/contenu local/contexte mondial ». Organisées par la section d’ARLIS/NA MOQ (Montréal-Ottawa-Québec) et par la Section des bibliothèques d’art de l’IFLA, les activités étaient commanditées par Artexte, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, le Centre Canadien d’Architecture, la Bibliothèque de l’Université McGill, le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal et Bibliothèque et Archives du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada.

Printed images provide vivid evidence concerning many facets of British history in the 16th and 17th centuries. Yet their exploitation has hitherto been inhibited partly by difficulties of access and partly by the lack of adequate means of searching for them by subject. In both respects, electronic technology is making major strides forward, as this article indicates with particular reference to a project aimed to make such material widely available in searchable, online form.

Video collections have been part of library holdings for several decades, but developing and managing these collections presents a number of challenges. This is the case particularly for artists’ film and video, and this article attempts to identify the issues involved and to offer some practical guidance, drawing on the experience of collection development and management at Chelsea College of Art and Design Library, and across the libraries of University of the Arts London and elsewhere.

How does an art museum library move into the digital arena? An account of four recent and current projects at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, involving the extraction of information of value from printed matter and its re-presentation on the web, throws light on this topic. The selection of resources for digitization, and the challenges of an integrated approach, have also raised issues requiring discussion and solution.

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Word and Image Department holds an estimated 750,000 prints, drawings, paintings and photographs. Recent acquisitions have been catalogued using the Museum’s Collections Information System, but the vast majority of earlier acquisitions are still only described in a wide range of card indexes and printed catalogues. The indexes have been scanned, but the Museum now needs to complete the transfer of the catalogue records to its online system. The ‘Factory’ digitisation project was established in November 2007, with the intention of digitising the Department’s entire holdings and making them available online. Some 15,000 objects have been photographed in the first year, and cataloguing is also under way. The digital images and catalogue descriptions will be made available online via the Museum’s website as the project proceeds.

This article describes the documentation centre at the contemporary art museum MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine in the Val-de-Marne, outside Paris, and in particular its audiovisual collections. It outlines the problems that have to be faced when seeking to make this material – documentaries and artists’ videos, whether purchased or produced in-house, even the museum’s audiovisual archives – available to the centre’s users.

In the Netherlands there are a number of subject-focused art libraries in museums that are particularly interesting because of their specialisations, even though they are quite small. This article describes four such libraries and the people who use them, their facilities and their place within the organisation. All are open to the general public, but in other ways they are quite different from one another.

The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection is a small specialist collection dedicated to the history of artists’ moving images in Britain, which is based at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts London. The Collection services the needs of both academics and curators in this specialist area. Its founders describe its raison d’être and collecting policy, and outline some of the challenges of working in an environment susceptible to changing research priorities and uncertain digital storage standards.

The World Wide Web has created significant changes in how cultural institutions, including galleries, communicate their role as custodians of cultural content and research. In this paper we discuss a number of initiatives involving the Research Library and curatorial sections at the National Gallery of Australia to bring information about Australian visual arts to an online audience.

How do you turn library, archive and museum collaboration from a good idea into reality? And what are the benefits of collaborative action to begin with? This article introduces the increasing rewards and risks of interdependent working relationships along the collaboration continuum, and highlights the institutional and environmental catalysts which foster collaborative action. Use these insights to assess where your institution is on the path to deeper collaboration, and which obstacles you may still need to address!

Particular attention has been paid to the large museum library in the Netherlands in recent years. Two new large museum libraries came into existence not long ago, in Eindhoven and Rotterdam. And at the beginning of 2010 another one will open its doors in Amsterdam, that of the Stedelijk Museum. The importance of good art historical libraries for the dissemination of information and research is increasingly being recognized by their parent institutions, and is as a result being communicated to a broader audience. That there are sometimes great differences in the way each operates within its institution and towards its users will be made clear in this article.

Art academy libraries belong to institutions that deal primarily with the development of artists. As a result the library usually functions in an environment where a great deal of experiment, research and study is going on, and is there as a resource for the students as they produce their visual and written work. When I was asked to write an article about them, I decided to make visits to several similar libraries in the Netherlands so that I could compare their characteristics, use and users.

The Gallica programme of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Digital Library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), are two major French initiatives in the digitisation of art history information. Gallica was launched in 1995 and by the end of 2007 incorporated some 80,000 images and 90,000 texts. Essentially encyclopaedic in content, it nevertheless contains much material relevant to art, including iconographic documents from the library’s specialist departments. Mass digitisation of some 100,000 works per annum from 2007 onwards will add a substantial body of texts and periodicals in this subject. INHA’s digitisation programme for its Digital Library began in 2002: the two main areas it is currently concentrating on are a corpus of ‘classics of art history’, and the digitisation of specialised and rare documents such as the pre-1920 catalogues of the Louvre. 200,000 images are already available on line.

This study evaluates the content coverage of Google Scholar, as it compares to three bibliographic databases – Arts & humanities citation index, Bibliography of the history of art and Art full text/Art index retrospective – on the subject of art history. The comparison reveals that it indexes roughly one-third of the 470 tested articles, dwarfed by the Arts & humanities citation index’s 73% coverage. Additionally, 64% of the 157 articles retrieved in Google Scholar are ‘citation-only’ records that contain incomplete bibliographic data and lack direct links to the abstracts or full text of the articles.

This case study provides an overview of the logistical aspects of introducing a DIY streaming service, from original idea to implementation, at Coventry University. The study includes reflection on practical problems such as the structuring of file names and complying with the terms and conditions of the ERA licence. It concludes with a short discussion of the impact of the new ERA+ licence on levels of use, together with possible future developments in streaming in the UK Higher Education sector.