Art and art history resources on the Web abound. Yet the process of identifying scholarly art information online is typically inefficient, leading many researchers to abandon Internet sources for traditional printed reference works. Locating websites that focus specifically on art and art history timelines can be an even greater challenge: these resources simply have not been available on the Web in any large number or degree of comprehensiveness. In recent years, however, new Web-based art timelines have been published, most notably by art educators, museums and other non-profit organizations. This evaluative webliography of selected art and art history timelines not only highlights the variety of resources that are currently available, but also illustrates that the majority of these Web resources focus upon the art of the Western world.

An exhibition entitled Eye (Level) Chart reviewed the twenty year history of Eye Level Gallery, an artist-run centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The temporal history of the Gallery was presented as a chronological gallery display of exhibition announcements, posters and graphic ephemera. More than a mere summary of exhibitions, significant social and cultural information was revealed through the charting of promotional materials that were astutely archived over a twenty-year period.

During the Renaissance and Baroque periods temporary festival monuments, architectural works, fireworks, and table pieces were designed for the time of celebrations and were destroyed or torn down at the ceremony’s end. Memories of these works live on in the books and prints published as historic accounts, souvenirs, and reports for those at a distance who were unable to attend. Now held in library and archival collections, these works on paper are indispensable sources for researchers who seek to describe and to interpret the transitory and disposable, yet extraordinary, art of festivals.

The importance of the creative process at Cirque du Soleil informed the establishment of its Documentation Centre nine years ago. The desire for conservation, a concern of the founding president as early as 1984, was initially related to the need to use earlier documents and materials in the creation of shows, rather than a desire to preserve history. Subsequently, the role of the archives has evolved and today Cirque du Soleil values the importance of memory and has put various tools in place to facilitate the collection and conservation of its history.

As the underpinnings of High Modernism were everywhere being called into question in the 1950s and 1960s, the art world endeavoured to reinvent itself in new ways. For example, the view that meaning in art need not be embodied in static, timeless objects of supposedly universal significance was challenged by the idea of art as time-based, context-specific, or ephemeral. For artists, these changes offered a way to reformulate the art world system in accordance with their vision of what mattered, and thus to diminish the authority of big museums, commercial galleries, and glossy trade magazines, whose main function seemed to be the promotion of art not as a mode of critical inquiry, but as a luxury product for ‘Establishment’ elites.

Conceptual art is not, and was not, a ‘movement’, but more a broad area of activity which privileges the idea over the material and the sensory. The ideas, process or activities of artists were documented in the form of text, photography, sound recordings, film, written or typed instructions and publishing.

A wealth of primary documentation has been produced and collected by artists and artist-run organizations since the 1970s. Alternative art activities were often time-based and experimented with form and material, and documentation has become essential as a means to study and understand the intent, the actualization and the impact of artworks. What are the key issues for artists, archivists and researchers interested in the collection, preservation and provision of future access to the archives of the avant-garde?

The Central Art Archives, founded in 1990 as a documentation and research institution within the Finnish National Gallery, have attempted to accept the challenges that contemporary art presents to archiving by realising extensive documentation projects covering conceptual, performance, land and environmental art in Finland. The corpus of documentary material includes photographs, slides, videos, interview transcripts, exhibition catalogues, etc. Currently the Central Art Archives is working together with the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma on a media art project.

A few of my favorite things is a description and explanation of artist-designed items collected over the past 20 years. The author, an artist, has a particular interest in simple objects that are very economically designed. Hundreds of such items have been collected over the past 20 years, including books, drawings, posters, invitations, prints, tickets, coins and multiples of all kinds. Eight favorite artist-designed items have been selected to illustrate the kinds of objects collected and the ways in which items find their way into the collection.

It is a paradox that the most visual method for storing and disseminating information, the Internet, continues to be unsatisfactory for the practice of researching visual culture in any scholarly or even thorough way, despite its advances within other areas of inquiry.

Since 1996, Canada’s Digital Collections (CDC), a federal government program has enabled organizations across Canada to add high-quality Canadian content on the Internet while providing on-the-job experience in information technology to young Canadians. This article presents an overview of CDC as a model for the digitization of various types of Canadian content. It also highlights three key aspects which have served the CDC program well: the use of alternative fiscal resources (youth employment funds); the development of an accountable and economical program design to facilitate digitization; and the fostering of partnerships among government, cultural institutions and entrepreneurial youth as a means of leveraging value-added results in digitization.

The practice of weeding, known more latterly as de-selection, stock disposal or even de-acquisitioning, is the ‘poor cousin’ of library practices. Librarians undertake weeding, often for reasons they would like to reverse, such as scarcity of space and resources. Whatever the reasons, librarians everywhere are doing it. They just do not like to talk about it.