Wolfgang Freitag’s seminal article, ‘The indivisibility of art librarianship’, published in the Art libraries journal in 1982, occasioned a revisiting of the premises of that article for the historic joint conference of ARLIS/NA and the Visual Resources Association in St. Louis in 2001 to see how his thesis stood the test of time. The two articles that follow, one each by Wolfgang Freitag and Martha Mahard, are reflections on the original article and the course of events in the intervening twenty years. They are published jointly, here and in Art documentation.

Higher education in the UK has always needed images, especially in the field of art and design, and institutions have built up their own slide libraries to service that demand. Latterly however it is digital images that are being sought by lecturers and students and numerous products are being produced to accommodate this need. Slide librarians need to educate themselves about these new products and update their skills in order to continue to ensure that their specialist knowledge of image use at higher education level is applied by the new developers.

In July of 2003 Corbis Corporation began an initiative to offer educational institutions fair-use access to the world’s largest and most diverse archive of digital images. At a time when many visual resource collections are struggling with how to satisfy the digital needs of their faculty and students, Corbis is hoping to help meet this challenge. Our experience with digital archive development and image management, albeit on a larger scale, closely mirrors much of what visual resource collections are tasked with today. This article introduces readers to Corbis and gives details about our collection of images, outlining what is available through the new Corbis Education program.

The papers generated by the research organisation ‘Mass-Observation’ provide a unique and insightful account of everyday life in the UK, documenting the years from 1937 until the mid-1950s. Using a variety of research methods (including in the early years photography and painting), Mass-Observation set about recording the lives of people throughout the country. In 1981 a new version of Mass-Observation was launched, based in the original Archive at the University of Sussex. Hundreds of volunteers record their own lives mostly in writing but also sometimes in images, in response to a variety of themes sent to them by the Archive. Research access is possible to both early and recent material.

This article looks at the many problems that art libraries experience in developing video art collections. It considers a range of issues, from why it is often difficult to acquire video art, to reasons why many of the respected art library collections do not actively collect such material. Most of the findings arise from a workshop called Diverse practices, which was held at Kent Institute of Art and Design in February 2003.