After several previous attempts to co-operate in post-war Belgium, art librarians in the Dutch-speaking part of the country have since 2000 grouped together under the name Overleg Kunstbibliotheken Vlaanderen (OKBV). The international acronym ARLIS/Flanders symbolises the close connection that is felt to the other art library organisations around the world. A year after its establishment, OKBV became the first official ‘intersectoral’ committee of the Flemish Library Association (Vlaamse Vereniging voor Bibliotheek, Archief en Documentatiewezen – VVBAD). The activities that have been organised since then are many and diverse. Meetings and projects about automation, cataloguing, collection development, promotion, professional development and the preservation of art publications have received the attention and support of many, the main goal always being to stimulate co-operation among art librarians in Flanders and – even better – in Belgium and beyond.

Located in the heart of the French capital, between the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine opened its doors in September 2007. This new cultural institution offers its varied visitors, from specialists to the simply curious, a vast reference library specialising in modern and contemporary architecture. Unique in Europe because of the nature of its holdings and its accessibility, this new library is also an architectural adventure, mixing contemporary volumes and reproductions of Romanesque paintings.

Although it began as the personal library of one of the most influential art historians and connoisseurs of the last century, the Biblioteca Berenson now has a broad interdisciplinary scope that goes far beyond art and art history. As the library of Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies since the 1960s, it has become a major resource for research into all aspects of the society, culture and thought of Italy between about 1200 and 1650. Nonetheless the Berenson Library offers rich and often unique resources for art historical research, both on the Renaissance and on the 20th century.

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.

As stated in its collection policy, the library of the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen supports the goals of the museum through collecting, indexing and providing access to documentary information to support art historical research within and outside the institution. The library’s collection development has a double focus: the exhaustive collecting and indexing of collection documentation, and the collecting of information about Western art history from the 13th century up to and including the 20th century (in analogy with the museum collection). While very specialised in content and in its in-depth indexing system, the library scans a broader scope to satisfy the fluctuating information needs of the museum staff. Today, collection development and management is becoming more and more co-operative, through various partnerships in Antwerp and also those with similar art libraries, especially where online access to datasets and electronic resources is concerned.

The Frick Art Reference Library, founded in 1920 as a research library accessible to the public, grew steadily in holdings and reputation throughout the 20th century. Its special text and image resources now make it ideal for a new era. Projects are underway to transform the Photoarchive into a digital surrogate. Among the aims of the Library’s newly established Center for the History of Collecting in America, as it responds to the changing needs of researchers, is to incorporate new areas for discussion, dialogue and workshops. As a participant in the planning stage of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), a recently conceived collaborative, the Frick will focus on shared access and delivery, reducing duplication, and further expanding research capabilities for a broader, ever-evolving community of users.

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.

Crafts Lives, an oral history project for National Life Stories at the British Library, records in-depth life stories of Britain’s craftspeople exploring both their personal and their working lives. This new archive will provide a well of new information for academics, historians, students and craftspeople to draw upon. It should also contribute to a definition of British crafts that will give them their proper place in relation to the fine arts.

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.

Although the library of the Fashion Museum of Province of Antwerp is only five years old, it already boasts an exciting history. Evolved from the collection of the national Vrieselhof Textiles and Costume Museum, the Fashion Museum Library opened its doors in 2002, in the heart of Antwerp, the Fashion City. This article relates the history of this library, with a look at both today and the future, attempting to pinpoint the uniqueness of what it means to manage a collection on the phenomenon of ‘contemporary fashion’.

On May 16th 2007 the British Library Centre for Conservation (BLCC) was opened, providing Conservation staff and Sound Archive Technical Services staff with a new purpose-built base from which to operate. The new building allowed them to be brought together onto the same site as their colleagues and co-located them with the collections for the first time. A BLCC-based programme of professional development events, special interest group events and public tours is providing Collection Care, Conservation, and the Sound Archive Technical Section with a public profile and a voice for communicating key messages about the Library’s stewardship of its collections and about caring for collections generally. The Centre, already a milestone in the history of collection care at the Library, is continuing an existing and ambitious change programme, giving the perfect opportunity to examine all aspects of operations and make changes of benefit to the Library and its staff.

On 5 May 2007, the Stedelijk Museum library in Amsterdam was exactly 50 years old – although a collection of books known as ‘the library’ began long before that in the building on the Paulus Potterstraat. Louis Kloet was the first librarian. He founded and ran the library from 1953 until 1980, a period in which the collection and the number of visitors grew steadily and it evolved into one of the most important libraries of modern art in Europe.

The Barnes Foundation is an educational institution located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Foundation’s world-renowned art collection and its twelve-acre arboretum serve its mission to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of fine arts and horticulture, through classes and workshops held in the Gallery and the Arboretum. The staff of the Foundation’s long-neglected archives and library is in the process of organizing and cataloguing its collections, and has recently completed a major grant-funded project to create finding aids for several of them.

Between 1965 and 1985, the library of the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen acquired three large collections: that of the library of the Association Belge de Photographie, the collection of magazines from Fritz L. Gruber and the company library of the photographic firm Agfa-Gevaert. The bibliographic activities associated with the history of photography were started in 1978 at the European Society for the History of Photography and resulted in a four-part History of photography: a bibliography of books, published 1989 to 1999. The FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen produced an augmented version of this bibliography on CD-ROM in 2003.

This article describes a job exchange between April Yasamee, Senior Library Assistant, Design Subject Librarian, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and Mary Mavroudis, School Liaison Librarian, Applied Communications, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. They exchanged jobs for three months between April and July 2007. April arrived in Melbourne just after the start of the academic year. Mary reached London at the beginning of the summer term and the exam period. The article takes the form of email correspondence between them, as they adapt to their new university libraries, noting the differences and similarities between the two institutions.

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.