This article describes the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, a unique archive of experimental art forms from the 1960s to the present, and how students and the general public make use of its welcoming access policies. It further addresses conservation efforts as they apply to a setting that strongly emphasizes hands-on usage of materials.

Librarians, archivists, and curators today meet unique challenges when facing huge numbers of photographs accumulated in their institutions. Coming to terms with these masses in a responsible way means to reflect on cataloguing and digitization standards able to record their (material) complexity. It also means to constantly justify a series of investments: in cataloguing and digitization projects, but also in storage space, restoration, archival and conservation materials, not to speak of human resources. It means, ultimately, to reflect on the systems of value that one decides to apply while dealing with these holdings: the dematerialization rhetoric that often goes hand-in-hand with digitization campaigns tends to increase their fragility, on the other side we are confronted more and more often with the ‘contemporary repackaging of erstwhile ephemeral and disposable photographic prints' that acquire a new ‘archival value’.1 In this short essay I will focus on these systems of value. My aim is to offer some methodological tools to deal with documentary photographs in art historical institutions. These instruments derive from the intersection of photographic and archival theories and practices that shaped my experience as Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute, for more than a decade.

A selection of ‘avant-garde’ journals, from the early 20th century onwards, which have included architectural material. The journals are grouped into countries (which appear in alphabetical order), and are then arranged chronologically by date first published. Part 2 covers journals from the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, U.S.A., U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia. Part 1 appeared in Art Libraries Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 1984. The journals are described by a number of contributors denoted by their initials: A3. (Antoine Baudin); A.R.G. (Antoni Ramon Graells); J.G. (Jacques Gubler); M.D.G. (Manolo De Giorgi); I.P. (Isabella Pezzini); P.G.T. (Piero G. Tanca).

The article is the translation of a survey ‘La rete delle riviste’ which first appeared in Rassegna, no. 12, December 1982 – a special issue entitled ‘Architettura nelle riviste d’avanguardia’.

‘The People’s Art’ is a project, originally titled ‘Visual Arts and the Working Class’ and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which aims to locate and document visual art produced by working class people in Britain since 1750 and especially from 1870 to the present. A lot of material, including work from the home and the workplace, ranging from paintings and photography to decorative and domestic arts of all kinds, has been located in museums (often in storerooms) and in private collections. An exhibition and an illustrated publication are planned. ‘The People’s Art’ demonstrates that the making of art can have a role in people’s lives which is too often overlooked, neglected, or denied, and which is not adequately represented in publications, exhibitions, museums, or libraries.

How do artists, designers, architects and craftspeople seek and deploy information in support of their practice? It is a question that is of central importance to the learning and teaching that art libraries provide, yet one that has also been subject to much debate within the historical and contemporary literature. An attentive reading of this literature reveals three fundamental metanarratives, each underpinned by a particular epistemology, and it is these narratives that have then informed how institutions construct, embed and assess the teaching of information skills to their readers. Only by critically evaluating the literature is it possible to resituate our own practice and that of our respective institutions within a paradigm that is most appropriate for our particular contexts. It is also possible to identify gaps in our collective professional understanding, in the hope of signposting avenues of research potential for the future.

In general terms, this paper is about the possibilities newly available to art historians, because of the new cheapness, of computing, and the problems which still exist in the areas of data and image storage, retrieval and display. First it tries to assess the technology from a layman’s point of view, then ventures into the contentious matter of how many art historians (in these days of reduced funding) are either able or willing to take advantage (if there are advantages) of new technology. Threading throughout the paper are doubts about whether the use of computers can or will advance the study of the subject (as opposed to making that study easier), and about whether the finance for some of the hardware mentioned could ever be raised by any non-scientific department.

In 2013, as the dissertation component of an MA Library and Information Studies course at University College London, I carried out a selective study of UK zine libraries and collections. Case studies of both ‘institutional’ collections that were part of established libraries like London College of Communication Library (University of the Arts London) and the British Library, and ‘independent’ collections such as Salford Zine Library, 56a Infoshop and the Edinburgh Fanzine archive were carried out to draw attention to issues around collection, care and accessibility of zine collections. As much of the literature around zine collections in libraries at that time was focused on the USA, it was important to draw attention to what was happening in the UK. This article summarizes the findings of my dissertation, and the developments in zine libraries and librarianship since I wrote it, as zine collections have become more popular and a growing field in the UK.

Information Competencies for Students in Design Disciplines compiled, for the first time in the US, a list of core information literacy skills for design students. Divided into basic, intermediate, and advanced skills in each design discipline, it helped to define and delimit information literacy skills in these subjects, and were intended to facilitate a systematic means of integrating information literacy skills into the core curriculum of design courses. Closely related to the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, Information Competencies were written by a group of art and design librarians (Jeanne Brown, Jane Carlin, Thomas Caswell, Edith Crowe, Maya Gervits, Susan Lewis, Alan Michelson, Barbara Opar and Jennifer Parker) and published by ARLIS/NA in 2006 (rev. 2007). This article is personal reflection by one of its authors on its legacy ten years after publication.

What is the importance of a zines collection to a contemporary visual arts library? What is their significance as research resources? This article explores the Stuart Hall Library zines collection, its history, management and use, and its role the context of the wider collection. It examines the collection's strengths and areas for development, including cataloguing and visibility. Key titles in the collection are described, and some of the themes and subjects covered. Local working practices and zine related activities are also discussed.

University College London (UCL) Library Services holds extensive Special Collections that are employed in various teaching and public engagement activities. Students and academic staff at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art have the opportunity to participate in the Slade Small Press Project that uses the UCL Small Press Collections as inspiration, recognising the current trend for printed material and text as a visual medium. UCL's BASc students, and participants at library public events focused on non-creative subjects, study ways in which the physical aspects of rare books contribute to understanding the text, with surprisingly creative outputs. While museums have recently adopted Object Based Learning (OBL) as a teaching strategy, this form of learning has long been familiar in libraries, particularly for special collections. However as readers increasingly access library text digitally, and perceive text as unaffected by medium, they are losing the skills to interpret physical books and printed material (skills we term ‘object literacy’), making OBL approaches more important than ever for library staff. In keeping with the UCL 2034 strategy, the Connected Curriculum encourages participation in research at all levels of study and OBL methods enable interdisciplinary enquiry and collaborative practices.

What is a materials collection? Why is it in the library? The aim of this paper is to introduce the idea of a materials collection as a result of explorations in arts based research. This involved theorizing ideas of materiality, haptic engagement with objects and relating them to the creative process within a library environment. The collection is a response to a perceived gap between theory and creative practice expressed within the student cohort. The risk to the library comprises a possible erosion of value in the student experience, in that the service becomes marginalized in contrast to the studio based activities. The nature of the research undertaken by the student cohort at the University for the Creative Arts is considered, and the development of the materials collection is presented as a response to this inquiry. The collection forms the site of haptic learning: the sensual engagement with the world is combined with a phenomenological approach to create a space within which the relationship of theory and practice may be developed.

What can current students preparing for careers as librarians, archivists and museum curators learn from the book as object and the book as art? How can artists’ books and artisans engaged in bookmaking, conservation and curating books inform our ideas of the book as more than its text? How does bookmaking deepen the connection for students between content and form? This article describes a 6-week workshop conducted at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto that explores the book from its earliest forms to artists’ books and includes many descriptions of books constructed by iSchool students.

Object-based learning lies at the heart of teaching in both historical bibliography and cataloguing classes on the MA Library and Information Studies at UCL. Tom Phillips's work A humument and the novel he chose to use as his canvas, W.H. Mallock's A human document provide memorable ‘object lessons’ with scope for students to synthesize and evaluate their pre-existing learning from inside and outside the modules. It is important that the examples used in class are simple enough to illustrate the strengths of any conceptual model yet complex enough to highlight its limits. It is also ideal if examples can be beautiful as well as useful. A humument fulfills all these criteria and, for students with no background in art or art librarianship, also introduces the artists' book as a genre and artists themselves as an important and interesting user group within information services.