Small countries – small libraries: is it possible to benefit from co-operation? Finnish art libraries have been establishing a co-operative network with the art libraries in the neighbouring Baltic countries throughout the 1990s. One of the aims has been to get Baltic and Nordic art libraries to work more closely together.

Latvian libraries have just begun to take their first steps towards automation and the introduction of new technologies. Implementation of a database of Latvian art catalogues will begin next year. The Association of Latvian Arts Libraries that would serve as a co-ordinating body, as well as a means of sharing experience and discussing future goals, has until now remained only an idea. But the enthusiasm of colleagues, as well the positive impact that art library societies in other countries have brought to art library operations, brings hope that it is not only a dream for the future.

Key to the provision of art information in Estonia is the National Library’s Fine Arts Information Centre, offering services to some 60,000 visitors each year as well as producing the national bibliographic databases of maps, posters, postcards, sound recordings and sheet music. But co-operation with other major art libraries in Estonia is also flourishing, beginning with the selection of new material for the art and architectural history collections in consultation with scholars in other arts organizations, and culminating in 1999 in the foundation of the Estonian Art Libraries Society. This year, Estonian Book Year, marking the 475th anniversary of the very first known Estonian book, seems an excellent opportunity to describe what is happening in art librarianship in this country.

Of the numerous libraries dealing with art documentation in Lithuania, it is the National Library which holds the most significant collection. The exhibition programme of its Arts Department is particularly noteworthy: displays of items from the collection travel all over the country and beyond its borders to foreign lands, including the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Finland. The enthusiasm generated has encouraged similar activities in other libraries, as is described in the directory of Lithuanian art libraries which concludes this article.

Funding opportunities and digitisation initiatives offer libraries, galleries and museums the potential to exploit their image collections – photographs, slides, drawings, pictures and works of art – in new and exciting ways. Many different organisations are involved in developing standards for the formal description of images (e.g. artist, title, photographer) and some effort is being made to develop compatible standards for the digital environment. Indexing of images can be a difficult task because images are rich in information and may be used by widely different groups of users, who may not always express their information needs adequately. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technology, which allows the retrieval of images based on similarity to a query image, has enormous potential, particularly if it can be combined with text-based indexing.

Successor to Thieme-Becker and Vollmer, those great standard reference works for art history, the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon is an even more ambitious undertaking which will eventually include entries for between 450,000 and 500,000 artists. The data will be published in a number of ways: in book format (including a couple of spin-off versions in hard copy), CD-ROM and, increasingly, online. This article describes the developments one AKL editor has witnessed in the production process for the projected 80 volumes of the complete work, and outlines its role as an authority for artists’ names.

Although somewhat concealed amongst the lakes and forests of Sorø, the Danish Museological Library has already been in existence for a quarter of a century, and is one of the very few libraries on museology in Europe. There is an increasing interest in the subject both in Denmark and in other countries which have had museums for centuries, where the concepts of the museum and museology are under active discussion and museological education is becoming more widely available.

This report is the result of the author spending three months as a visiting scholar at Nanjing Arts Institute in the People’s Republic of China. The first section was published in the Art Libraries Journal vol. 25 no. 4 2000 and gave general background information about a number of art libraries in China, their collections, and the resources available for acquisitions and staffing. In this concluding part the author documents the cataloguing and classification systems being used by the same libraries, their computer applications and networking, the public services they offer, and their physical layout.