As former colonial links and reliance on a technologically-developed ‘West’ recede into the past, Asian and Pacific countries, including Australia, are becoming increasingly aware of one another as neighbours. Circulation of exhibitions, artists’ visits, cultural festivals, government and UNESCO activities, and art publishing, provide a network for sharing art and art information between countries in this region. Among art libraries, those in Australia and New Zealand participate in the network represented by ARLIS/ANZ; the IFLA Section of Art Libraries and its global role offers scope for further developments. An Asian/Pacific ‘ARLIS’ is proposed.

Learning about Japanese art has been difficult for Westerners. Limited access, language barriers, and cultural misunderstanding have been almost insurmountable obstacles. Knowledge of Japanese art in the West began over 150 years before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853. Englebert Kaempfer (1657-1716), sent to Japan as a physician for the Dutch East India Company, befriended a young assistant who provided information for a book on Japanese life and history published in 1727. By 1850, more ethnographic information had been published in Europe. Catalogs of sales of Japanese art in Europe exist prior to 1850 and collection catalogs from major museums follow in the second half of that century. After the Meiji Restoration (1867) cultural exchange was possible and organizations for that purpose were formed. Diaries of 19th century travellers and important international fairs further expanded cross-cultural information. Okakura Kakuzo, a native of Japan, published in English about Japanese art and ultimately became Curator of the important collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The advent of photography made visual images easily accessible to Westerners. Great collectors built up the holdings of major American museums. In the 20th century, materials written and published in Japan in English language have furthered understanding of Japanese culture. During the past twenty years, travelling exhibitions and scholarly catalogs have circulated in the West. Presently monographs, dissertations and translated scholarly texts are available. Unfortunately, there is little understanding in the West of the organization of Japanese art libraries and archives which contain primary source material of interest to art historians.

In recent times Japanese posters have increasingly been appreciated all over the world. Their history is traced from the Edo period (the 18th and 19th centuries) in relation to Japan’s economic and commercial development. Only a few museums and libraries in Japan have established poster collections; these collect posters either as ‘art objects’ or as examples of graphic design. Methods of acquiring, arranging, and accommodating posters are described.

A six-month project undertaken by the University College Dublin School of Architecture has investigated the possibilities of putting a collection of images, transferred from slides, on to videodisc accessed through a computer. The project grew out of an earlier project to computerize the catalogue of the Slide Library of the Architecture and Planning Library. Drawbacks include loss of image quality and the impossibility of adding to the disc once pressed. Changing technology may provide answers to some of these problems, enabling the benefits confirmed by the project’s successful completion to be exploited further.

One of a number of events which marked the reopening of the José Maria Lafragua Library, an important 19th century Mexican public library, was a dialogue between a librarian, Elsa Barberena, and an art historian, Marco Diaz. José Maria Lafragua was a historian, politician, writer, and supporter of the arts in the city of Puebla; the dialogue deals not only with his Library, but also with other libraries founded with the intention of disseminating European culture in the ‘New Spain’, the collections of which contain many rare and fine books. Access to books and the experience of handling them has tended to be a privilege of the few in spite of Lafragua’s purpose in founding a public library; the reopening of his Library, which belongs to the Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, is a signal contribution to implementation of the principle that books are for all.