A set of papers becomes an archive when its life as a series of active documents is finished and they are deemed worthy of permanent preservation. Archives are not, however, an ending but rather a beginning. Although one of the major functions of a repository is to store and preserve, one of the other challenges for archivists is how to activate their collections and exploit the latent potential of the silent memory that is stored in the boxes. This article outlines how the archive at the Henry Moore Institute is attempting to do this.

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.

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.

Slavic manuscripts present unique problems to the librarian, curator and scholar. Slavic works are marginalized in Western library institutions and educational curricula due to misconceptions about their intellectual value, the difficulties of studying them in Soviet and then post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and their lack of documentation, preservation and conservation. Cross-disciplinary interest, however, has expanded research beyond geographical and temporal boundaries to incorporate the technologies and viewpoints of literary criticism, historiography and even information architecture and hypertext theory. This article describes the author’s discovery of Slavic medieval manuscripts and her efforts to preserve, catalog, digitize, study and popularize them in a West that views the Middle Ages through the clouded lens of contemporary popular culture.

Founded in 1954, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art collects, preserves and makes available primary sources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items strong, its collections comprise the world’s largest single source for letters, diaries, financial records, unpublished writings, sketchbooks, scrapbooks and photographs created by artists, critics, collectors, art dealers and art societies – the raw material for scholarship in American art.

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.

Art ephemera are an evocative resource that can document innovative art and convey diverse histories. This article looks at the relationship between such ephemera and contemporary art practices, and at the relative values given to ephemera by artists, curators and librarians and, in this context, considers integrated catalogues and online guides as methods of re-contextualising art ephemera in the library. Recent collaborative initiatives, and projects that identify and locate artists’ files are reviewed here and three themes are identified: the biographical approach, interfaces for distributed catalogues and the integration of art and its documentation.

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.

Trade literature at Winterthur is broadly defined and is collected in many formats, including published trade catalogs, printed ephemera, drawings, manuscript account books, magazines and salesperson’s samples. Each kind of source contributes to a better understanding of America’s rich heritage in early handicraft, more modern production of goods, and domestic life. Examples of Winterthur’s holdings suggest a rich and much larger collection that is available for research.