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.

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.

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.

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.

Moulds are an ever-present threat to library collections and in 2007 a serious outbreak occurred at Tate Library and Archive. Early detection followed by prompt action ensured that any lasting damage was prevented. Services continued to be offered to users during a two-month period while collections were inaccessible as environmental conditions were improved and the mould infestation was eradicated. The keys to success were good communication with library users, advice from experts in the field of building health problems and the willingness of Library and Archive staff to clean a quarter of a million volumes.

Here are some valuable tips for searching the web professionally for antiquarian books, and some helpful quality control for some of the book metasearch engines. It is important to remember that it is much more productive to use one of these engines than simply to use Abebooks. One can also search for books at auctions, although this takes a lot more time since no metasearch engines are currently available.

The large number of donations to the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp, and the inevitable expenditure of time involved in dealing with them, gave rise to the author’s research into this form of acquisition, and in turn to publication of a guide outlining the most efficient way of handling them. The article outlines and explains the steps which should be taken to manage donations, bequests and transfers from other libraries, from basic advice such as including a section on donations in the library’s collection development policy, to the importance of efficient record-keeping in order to avoid disputes.

Vitterhetsakademiens Library (The Library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities) at the Swedish National Heritage Board is a partner in the development of new services in Sweden, both physically at the Library and digitally on the internet. An agreement signed by four partners in September 2007 aimed to strengthen and develop the Library’s services to the research community. In 2005 seven libraries in Stockholm formed a network with the specific aim of improving the quality of library services for research in the humanities. And in 2007 a new internet search service was launched which enables cross searching of major databases that cover various aspects of the Swedish cultural heritage; this includes two databases hosted by the Library. This process of cutting across institutional and sectoral borders has been facilitated by modern technology.