The ArtAfrica project was launched by the Fine Arts Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in January 2001, as part of its policy of aiding development. Its aim is to promote and stimulate knowledge and understanding of the work of contemporary African artists, in particular those of African descent resident in the five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa – Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe – but also those in communities of emigrants from the African continent in diasporas based in Portugal, Europe and elsewhere. The project’s goals are to create opportunities for dialogue, collaboration and the exchange of information, especially about those five countries, and in addition to provide a platform from which to launch widespread debate on post-colonialism in local contexts.

The Sámi, as Europe’s only indigenous people, have a cultural heritage which is being carefully preserved in all four of the Nordic countries. There are some 20,000 Sámi people in Sweden; they inhabit Laponia in Swedish Lapland, which is situated just north of the Arctic circle and was designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 1996. This article highlights websites for Swedish Sámi research at a national level.

Three successive projects – Digmo, Digmore and eLibrary & Culture without Borders – were carried out between 2001 and 2007. These aimed to make Lapland’s culture available in digital form to a wider audience, and involved co-operation between a range of institutions. Now another project, Arctic Culture (ACU), is being developed and promises to continue the momentum.

The musée du quai Branly, dedicated to the arts and civilisations of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, has been open since 20 June 2006. Its holdings came from two pre-existing museums, and also from a number of new acquisitions. The museum’s library conserves and enhances the value of three heritage collections – the documents in the library itself, those in the drawings, engravings and photographs collection and the archive pieces and documents about the collections – and a miscellany of users is welcomed to its three dedicated research spaces, from museum visitors to internationally renowned scholars. An ambitious policy has led it to define and develop tools for consulting the collections, and to create a virtual collection in the form of a documentary web portal, through which the museum diffuses its research and heritage documents on the internet. The archives and the collections documentation described below perfectly illustrate how this works.

Global Memory Net is a multi-year digital library project supported by the International Digital Library Programme of the US National Science Foundation. It has already digitally preserved and documented a number of art collections relating to indigenous groups, particularly in the Far East. So far it includes those of 56 ethnic groups in China and 54 minority ethnic groups in Vietnam; the Naxi Collection of the Library of Congress Asian Division; Taiwan Memory; and many others are included in its World Digital Collection which relate to relevant populations across the world. A more recent development is a partnership with UNESCO’s World Heritage Center: the establishment of the first virtual US World Heritage Digital Center, using Global Memory Net’s technology to provide multimedia and multilingual information on the 851 world heritage sites of 141 countries.

Papunya Tula Artists is a company owned and directed by Aboriginal people from the Western Desert, predominantly from the Luritja and Pintupi language groups. It currently has 49 shareholders and represents around 120 artists. The broad aims of the company are to promote individual artists, and to provide economic development for the communities to which they belong, thereby preserving and extending their traditional culture. Towards the end of 1993 the Art Gallery of New South Wales entered into a formal partnership with the company to assist it in preserving, copying and providing access to their immensely important archival records. The project, which at first seemed straightforward and easily manageable, raised a number of important issues about the provision of archival services for Indigenous art and provides a useful case study for reflecting on these.

This review of selected paper and electronic resources on Native American art describes what is available at the Haskell Indian Nations University Library and Archives in Lawrence, Kansas; the Institute of American Indian Arts Library and Archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the H.A. & Mary K. Chapman Library and Archives at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives at the Heard Museum Library in Phoenix, Arizona. These four institutions develop and maintain resources and collections on Native American art and make the information they contain about indigenous groups available not only to their users and other scholars but also to the wider world.