Like so many people who enter their fourth decade and decide they need to make a life change, the Art libraries journal celebrates its 40th anniversary with some exciting changes. The most obvious should have hit you when you opened the post: we have a new look which presents a contemporary interpretation of the journal's traditional aesthetic. It has also been the desire of a succession of editors' (and readers) to be able to publish colour images, but until now that has not been financially feasible. In addition to the ability to include colour images in articles, we have also refreshed our typography and layout. Design is a fraught topic for art librarians, but we waded in with the help of the Cambridge University Press (CUP) designer and hope you like the results.
Four previous ALJ re-designs
This coincides with our new publishing partnership with CUP. It is a great pleasure to be working with the UK's oldest academic publishing house with its tradition of producing journals for learned societies. It is not an easy decision to choose a publisher with whom to collaborate and we had to balance some business and professional realities with our editorial ambitions. Journal publishing is a rapidly evolving industry and a niche publication needs some high-powered technological backing in order to maintain its position in an information environment that continually changes. We have often featured articles about the hybrid library, but librarianship itself is a hybrid profession: part analogue, part digital. For the journal to ignore either aspect risks alienating our readership. The editorial team and ARLIS feel we have achieved a comfortable working relationship with CUP and their expertise will support the editors in their endeavours to feature interesting and relevant content. They will also bring the journal's current and back issues to members in digital format on a stable and accessible platform, while still producing a print copy that so many members like to read without the aid of an electronic device.
Of course nothing matches the hard copy and that was brought home to me as I prepared a set of issues to be sent to CUP for digitization – watch for the launch of the archive next year. The early typed and copied issues, the move from small format to A4, and the typesetting all combine to create something that does not transmit in digital. We are not an art journal but we are all surrounded by art publications and ALJ editors have been influenced by the materials and design of art publishing when they created and, occasionally, re-designed the journal.
In 2016, we would like to look back at the journal's 40 years throughout the volume. We decided not to re-print lots of articles from previous issues because ARLIS/UK & Ireland's 40th anniversary publication in 2009 has done that already. Instead, we'd like to reflect on the journal's past in a more subtle way. So, if any of you are minded to explore in the ALJ archive and create a response to what you find, the editors would like to hear from you. We have a few ideas of our own, but we are open to suggestions, as well.
This first issue of 2016 has the mix of articles you have come to expect. It opens with an issue within an issue about the law. It seems there is never enough guidance about changes to copyright legislation and Victoria Stobo has provided an update of the recent exceptions, with particular reference to archives. Artist Michael Takeo Magruder talks with lawyer and academic Jeremy Pilcher about how his own art practice intersects with the law, archives, and one of today's buzz words: big data. Claudy Op den Kamp looks at artists who work with film archives and how they navigate copyright law to re-purpose existing film.
Peter Wright tackles visual literacy in a world awash with visual imagery. He, as a former slide librarian, epitomizes some of the changes the library profession has undergone over the years. Although he maintains a curatorial role for images, he now finds himself teaching art & design students how to interpret images, then use and re-use those images in their own practice and research.
We visit two very different resources for the graphic arts. Mike Daines describes the transition from print glossary or dictionary to eLexicons electronic resource for the history of typography. Very much in the analogue world, Yamuna Ravindran brings us to the Outset Study, a unique resource for drawing, at the Drawing Centre in London.
To wrap up the articles, we feature a translation of Dorothea Haffner's work about artists' estates and their management in libraries and museums, and featuring various research sources in Germany. The original piece first appeared in 2014 in the AKMB-news, the journal for art and museum libraries in the German-speaking world. And to follow on, we have reviews of 2 recent reference books: one, also a translation, about sculpture and the other for screen-printing.
With that, I warmly welcome you to a new era for the Art Libraries Journal, we look forward to hearing your comments @ArtLibJournal or via more traditional channels of feedback.
