Since 1990 the National Life Story Collection has documented the lives of almost eighty of Britain’s visual artists by means of in-depth tape-recordings, often completed over many months. Cathy Courtney, Project Officer of Artists’ Lives, describes the evolution of an initiative which will subtly alter the context in which historians of the future come to assess the art of our time.

What is library co-operation, what is its current relevance and how is its nature and purpose changing in today’s information world? What are the particular types of co-operative activity that art librarians have taken part in, and what have been their successes and failures? This article examines a range of projects carried out by ARLIS/UK & Ireland and others, from directories and union lists to cataloguing and indexing and disposal of stock. It considers the relationship between cooperative initiatives which can best be undertaken at local level and those where a national strategy and infrastructure are necessary. Finally it draws practical and realistic conclusions from a combination of past experience and a little crystal ball gazing.

Can museums and libraries profit from sharing their information, visual or textual? Is direct access to digital archives a more logical or economic way to develop access to images for teaching and research than assembling local collections? Recent digital image library projects in the United States, and their impact on the teaching practices of art and architectural historians, show the advantages of focusing on issues such as licensing and intellectual property, metadata and evolving cataloging practice, image quality, and the different costs of creation and delivery. But there are other potential benefits such as document delivery and the dissemination of archival information, as well as the preservation of fragile illustrated texts through digital imaging.

The Hazen Center is a state-of-the-art electronic resource center situated within the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It provides access to art historical research and other scholarly resources available via electronic media such as CD-ROMs and the Internet, and also serves as a teaching center for their use. The Center is used by the Museum’s staff, the academic community, and by visiting art researchers.

For six months between July and December 1997 Wilson Smith, a Faculty Librarian at Edinburgh College of Art, acted as Reader Services Librarian in the library of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI. Here he gives his impressions of the School and its ambience, and describes the library and its collections, along with the work he undertook there. An Appendix gives details of some of the other art libraries he visited in the United States.