Although art librarians began to join together in North America in the 1920s, they did so in two distinct strands — museum librarians and public librarians. Art librarians of all kinds, including, significantly, art librarians in higher education, formed national associations from the late 1960s, and almost immediately began to establish the international links which culminated in the coming into being of the IFLA Section of Art Libraries. International cooperation, including networking of resources, is helping art libraries to serve users worldwide. Art librarianship is now so well established as an international enterprise that it can afford to admit other arts information professionals; nonetheless it needs to continue to work towards becoming a genuinely multi-cultural professional community which does not privilege any country, region, language, culture, gender, or point of view.

Since the inception of ARLIS/ANZ, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly seen themselves as part of the Asia-Pacific region rather than as a distant outpost of Britain. The impact of post-War European immigrants from countries other than Britain has been felt and immigration from the Asia-Pacific region is now equally important. These developments have contributed to a confident, diverse culture, within which indigenous art has gained greater recognition. Art librarians are benefiting from worldwide electronic communications which have equally helped overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ within the region itself. Thus, ARLISANZ-L now complements ARLIS/ANZ News. Because of the vast distance between members, ARLIS/ANZ bases its entire central executive within a single local chapter for two years at a time. Local chapters are flourishing, most particularly around major centres. Dispersal of members is also overcome by the all-important annual conferences and workshops. Like other ARLIS groups, ARLIS/ANZ engages in advocacy on behalf of art libraries and art librarians. A major concern for ARLIS/ANZ remains the documentation of the art of Australia and New Zealand both as a result of scholarship and publishing from within the region, and in major international bibliographies and indexes.

From the point of view of a student of art history in the 1980s re-entering the discipline as a graduate student, the ‘new’ art history represents a dramatically wider field of enquiry involving new methodologies, although ‘old’ art history is still pursued by some academics. The ‘new’ art history employs an interdisciplinary approach which embraces materials far beyond ‘traditional’ art historical sources, and so information has to be sought outside the art library and via the Internet. Librarians responsible for supporting art history studies need to keep in touch with teachers, with curriculum developments, and with the discipline itself; it may also be helpful to get involved in staff/student use of the Web, and to collaborate with other Humanities librarians. The way in which the ‘new’ art history branches out in all directions parallels the hypertext linkages of the Web and the complexity of our globally-connected world.

Internet resources in any discipline are difficult to locate reliably, but the problem is exacerbated for the visual arts community by the intrinsic complexity of retrieving visual resources. After a brief examination of the problems associated with the discovery of networked resources, this paper outlines the development, integration and future objectives of two visual arts information services, the Art, Design, Architecture & Media Information Gateway (ADAM) and the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), both funded for the benefit of the UK Higher Education community by the Joint Information Systems Committee.

The concept of a Library and Information Plan (LIP) as an aid to better management and improved services was proposed in England in 1986, when gaps in library provision and the inadequacy of services were becoming apparent. In 1991 the Council of ARLIS/UK & Eire obtained a grant to draft a proposal for a research project, arguing the need for a LIP covering art, design and architecture information in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Further funds were found to appoint a Steering Committee and a research consultant, and a Visual Arts Library and Information Plan (VALIP) was published in 1993. An Executive Committee was formed to negotiate the inclusion of VALIP in whatever national machinery came into existence. During that year the Secretary of State for National Heritage announced plans to create a new Library and Information Commission, but despite encouraging signs, government support was not given to fund a VALIP Manager. Progress was made with some parts of the VALIP programme of work, but the Steering Committee and the Executive Committee disbanded in 1997, leaving ARLIS to find other means of improving access to visual arts materials.

Jules Maciet’s encyclopaedic collection of iconography in the Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, one of Paris’s most accessible specialist art libraries, offers the researcher an eclectic range of visual material from rare prints to ephemera from current elections. Its founder’s ambition that it should be exhaustive has been sustained to this day by a succession of librarians who have chosen to adhere to the original arrangement of material, which is based on a system familiar to users of print departments such as that in the Bibliothèque nationale. An index to engravers, publishers, and print-sellers, and thorough documentation of sources, make this 19th century vision a reference tool which continues to serve artists and other users today.