The private view card is a ubiquitous form of art ephemera. Produced in large quantities and circulated widely within the art world, it has evolved over time from the simple postcard invitation to a vehicle for graphic and artistic creative licence, taking on in the process the widest (and weirdest) forms. At the same time it becomes, retrospectively, vital documentation of that art world, providing information otherwise untraceable through more conventional publications.

For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library’s existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, ‘boutique’ digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th-century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian’s collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the Project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15 th century.

The London Library, an independent subscription lending library and registered educational charity, has been providing a wide selection of books for loan to members in all aspects of the humanities since 1841. Books and periodicals on applied art and the history of art, in all the major European languages, form an increasingly important part of its collections. The Library is embarking on a period of extension and development, and welcomes new members.

ARTstor (http://www.artstor.org) is a digital library consisting of images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities and social sciences, along with a set of tools to support use of those images in research and pedagogy. Originally conceived as a project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001, ARTstor became an independent not-for-profit organization in January 2004 and launched the digital library in July of that year. ARTstor works closely with both providers and users of content from educational and cultural institutions around the world in creating a resource that meets the needs of the scholarly, educational and cultural communities. At present, the ARTstor Digital Library contains over 420,000 digital images and descriptive data; software to enable active use of the images in the digital library; and tools that allow users to access and use personal and/or institutional images along with ARTstor content for scholarship and teaching.

The Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels (ZADIK = Central Archive of the International Art Trade) was established in 1992 by the Bundesverband Deutscher Galerien (BVDG), the association of German art dealers, and is the only research archive in the world that specialises in collecting and preserving documents and information from the art market. The history, purpose, collection profile and work of this still very young art archive is described here.

Based on the acceptance of a future of continuing and accelerating change, this paper looks at the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental issues which impact on us as art librarians, and looks back to see what lessons might be learned to help us deal with a future we cannot predict with any certainty.

The current information environment presents opportunities for sharing information and enhancing the public domain of creative resources for education, research and the public good. Because the sharing paradigm for digital resources is fundamentally different from any we experienced in the analog world, practices of non-profit cultural heritage collecting institutions should be re-examined and re-evaluated with respect to aligning mission with new opportunities. One practice that deserves attention, particularly in this new environment, is the continued assertion of intellectual property rights in images of creative works that are themselves in the public domain.

The British Library, the UK’s national library, has often been described as a ‘hidden treasure’, with a huge amount of material and expertise which could support the creative sector, including graphic design, product design, the performing arts and fashion. During a recent visit Zandra Rhodes, the renowned fashion designer, called the Library a ‘Pandora’s Box’.

New Zealanders like to think of themselves as high users of the latest technology. Does this extend to digital imagery in the workplace? Curators at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki were surveyed regarding digital image sources, their use and the problems and opportunities they presented. They were found to be keen, adept users, satisfied with their technical and retrieval capabilities, and aware of issues relating to copyright and image storage. Happy with thumbnails in many instances, they employed the skills of the Gallery’s professional photographers when higher quality images were required. Looking at the move from analogue to digital, slide use was found to be negligible but reproductions in books and journals were still a favoured source. Disadvantages were downplayed and the positive impact of digital imagery was stressed.

At the same time that visual media play an ever expanding role in culture and society, technology offers new opportunities for using them in teaching and learning, far beyond what was possible with traditional analog image collections. Faculty and staff in art and art history, the library and instructional technology at James Madison University have collaborated in the creation of the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID), an innovative online teaching and learning system, to accommodate the exploding need for visual information. MDID is an open source system for managing digital images including personal image collections and displaying them in the classroom. Its support for sharing image collections among institutions and the expanding community of users offers new opportunities for collaboration in providing visual media for teaching and learning.

Mergers and re-organisations within the world of art institutions have a substantial impact on art libraries, their collections and their services. Development of such combined libraries has been from small units with in-depth knowledge within a limited subject field towards a broader, more general approach to knowledge, comprising a wider variety of subjects and tasks. What impact has this had on art libraries, their parent institutions and their users and staff?