Much is made of the way in which technology has transformed libraries – as indeed it has; but not out of all recognition and not particularly markedly as yet in the case of art libraries. We still seem to have a fewbooks around; we may be becoming acutely aware of the perils of the e-journal but most of us haven’t actually got many of them yet; I suspect that we talk more about digitisation than we digitise; and many of the materials which are specific to art libraries are likely to be well back in the queue for transformation.

This paper looks at the way architecture students at Queen’s University are educated in the art of information retrieval from their undergraduate to their postgraduate years. Particular emphasis is paid to the role the librarian plays in the first year project to research, and produce a model of, a seminal building and to the development of PADDI (Planning Architecture Design Database Ireland) as a teaching tool for researching local architecture. The impact on library management is examined in relation to effective deployment of decreasing staff resources in the face of increasing student numbers; the raising of the profile of library staff within the Faculty; the more focused allocation of budgets through involvement with course planning; and the growth of new services, arising from an improved awareness of student needs.

Lecturers and librarians are often working separately to achieve the same goal: facilitating student learning. This paper describes a workshop that addresses these issues, examines tradition and practice that reinforce the separation and identifies strategies for closer collaboration.

The National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London has always seen itself as primarily an educational institution, with training as an integral part of its fabric. There are two fundamental strands to this training the provision of training by our librarians to the users, and the training the staff receive in order to develop and better perform their jobs.

Subject access to physical or electronic resource collections can be divided into two complementary areas: searching and browsing. Searching involves the use of subject headings, indexing terms from a controlled vocabulary, or natural language keywords. Browsing, whether along a shelf or through a subject tree on the Web, requires the application of some kind of taxonomy or classification scheme. This article looks at what class schemes art libraries are using to arrange their book collections in the UK today. Based on an informal survey via the ARLIS e-mail discussion list, it appears that the Dewey Decimal Classification is not only the most commonly used class scheme, but the one most art libraries choose when they reclassify their library.

The library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris has recently conducted detailed research into the classification which will be used for the large amount of stock which will be on open access to its users. A working group was established which, after rejecting the idea of a specially created scheme, looked at what other systems were available, comparing those currently in use in the largest art and archaeology libraries in France and abroad. They also studied the two encyclopaedic classifications – Dewey and UDC. The final recommendation was adoption of the Library of Congress Classification and work to implement this decision is now under way.

Because art institutions in The Netherlands all too often do not include library collections in their emergency response programs, ARLIS/NL decided to prepare guidelines for disaster planning in art libraries. These guidelines, now on the website of ARLIS/NL, serve as a tool in the process of disaster planning and can be customised to the individual situation of each library. This article describes the setting up of the project and its results.

This overview of the London Institute Library and Learning Resources website, the i page, focuses in particular on issues involved in selecting and evaluating high quality resources in an academic context. The article begins by detailing the philosophy, design and initial construction of the site, and gives an outline of the structure. The most heavily used section of the i page is the web guides and the evaluation criteria applied to web resources selected for inclusion are examined, with reference to the digital art web guide. The main criteria of content, structure, authority and subjectivity are looked at in detail. The process of user feedback is highlighted and, as the site is now over two years old, pertinent issues relating to its future growth and development are also discussed.

The Union list of art, architecture and design serials, an online database of periodicals on fine and applied arts, film and television held by academic, public, national and special libraries throughout the UK and Ireland, has been some ten years in the making and work is still progressing. In autumn 2000 funding was obtained to allow for greater progress on this critical research tool, extending the coverage of participating libraries and enhancing the bibliographical records. However the work of increasing the level of participation in the Union list has largely been taken forward by direct approaches to individual institutions and by July 2002 there will be over 60 participating libraries as well as fuller bibliographic citations.

Exhibition and sales catalogues are notoriously hard to locate. This problem will be soon be alleviated in the UK by HOGARTH, a project to facilitate research access to the major collections in the history of art within the concept of the distributed national collection in the subject. A second benefit will be the creation of an electronic directory of collections of art history documentation in this country. The project is currently at halfway stage and this article outlines its background, its methodology, progress to date and future developments.