During the 20th century, and particularly since its adoption of easel painting, the continuing development of American Indian art has resisted attempts to contain and circumscribe it within definitions and categories imposed by outsiders — art critics, art historians, and the authors of many of the most readily available books on the subject. Native Americans are determined not only to remain in control of their art but also to have a say in how it is interpreted. A bibliography of sources follows an introductory survey of Native American statements about Native American art.

In 1956 the American University in Cairo (AUC) committed itself to the formidable task of transforming a purchased personal library into a specialized university library supporting research and teaching in a new curriculum in Islamic art and architecture. The library’s original owner, K. A. C. Creswell, the eminent British historian of Islamic architecture, became at age 77 the university’s first professor in the discipline. An agreement that he would have exclusive use of the library during a three-year teaching period set the pattern for later years. Until 1973, while Creswell remained in Cairo, the uncatalogued library, though used by Islamic art faculty and their thesis-writing students, was barely accessible to other Islamic art students and faculty in related fields. Secrecy surrounding the library’s purchase hindered the university’s dealings with Creswell. When the Suez War interrupted final arrangements, Creswell’s exemption from the government-ordered expulsion of British nationals, and permission to move the books to the university, were secured by telling the government of Egypt that the library was Creswell’s gift to AUC.

As a result of the momentous changes taking place in Russia, people and institutions have acquired a new freedom which they have not been prepared for. Art libraries can offer opportunities for people to use their freedom well, but their collections are inadequate and they are desperately short of money. At the same time, prices of books have risen sharply, and the introduction of charges for inter-library lending is inhibiting smaller libraries from borrowing material for their users. Library collections are being depleted by theft, sometimes perpetrated by hard-up librarians. Cooperation between art libraries could help, but libraries accustomed to a rigid centralized system scarcely know how to begin to cooperate voluntarily; nonetheless, some first steps have been taken by a number of Moscow’s art libraries. Russian art libraries are of several kinds, notably museum libraries, serving their own institutions in the first instance, and art departments of large public libraries, but there is no national art library to serve as the focal point of a network; in the absence of cooperation and networking, collection development and stock-editing are guided only by the immediate needs of particular libraries. Russian libraries, not least the Library of Foreign Literature, desperately need not only to develop networking at home, but also to establish links with libraries abroad.

Reviving the spirit of an earlier phase of cooperation, art librarians in the Netherlands joined together informally at the end of 1982 under the title ‘Overleg Kunsthistorische Bibliotheken’ (OKB); although this title remains in force, for international purposes the acronym ARLIS/NL was adopted in 1992. Meetings are held at least four times each year. The group helped to organise the 2nd European Conference of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries, at Amsterdam, in 1986, and prepared the contents of a special issue of Art Libraries Journal devoted to art libraries in the Netherlands, which appeared the following year. ARLIS/NL has also concerned itself with shared cataloguing, favouring TINLIB, and with coordinated collection policies, in association with Dutch university libraries and the Royal Library, while as a result of an ARLIS/NL initiative all member libraries are to submit periodicals holdings data to the Central Catalogue of Periodicals.

The Italian art libraries association, BiArte, first came together at the 3rd European Conference of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries at Florence in 1988, and was officially launched at Prato the following year. Through participation in book fairs and other activities, BiArte is actively seeking to develop relationships between art libraries, publishers, and the providers of bibliographies and databases.