FACILITIES STANDARDS FOR ART LIBRARIES AND VISUAL RESOURCES COLLECTIONS byBetty Jo IrvineReview by: Joy BlouinArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 12, No. 2(Summer 1993), pp. 87-88Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948540 .

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Art Documentation, Summer 1993 87

THE REVIEW SECTION Joan Stahl, Editor

I

REFERENCE POINTS FACILITIES STANDARDS FOR ART LIBRARIES AND VI SUAL RESOURCES COLLECTIONS / Edited by Betty Jo Ir

vine.?Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, February 1991.?

232 p.?ISBN 0-87287-929-1; LC 90-26055: $32.50; $39.00 (outside North America).

Facilities Standards for Art Libraries and Visual Resources Collections

provides standards for art librarians and visual resources profes sionals whose responsibilities involve designing, renovating, and/ or maintaining facilities which accommodate art libraries and/or

visual resources collections. This publication is the culmination of the work of the ARLIS/NA Standards Committee on Physical Facilities, chaired by Dr. Betty Jo Irvine. In 1983 the ARLIS/NA Executive Board charged the facilities standards committee with

establishing standards for the construction, renovation, and main

tenance of facilities housing art libraries and visual resources

collections. The strength of this resulting publication is the re sult of three factors: (1) the expertise brought to the committee

by Dr. Irvine and the accomplished members of the committee; (2) the committee's appreciation for, and understanding of, pre vious published research concerning facilities standards, notably Keyes Metcalfs research published in 1986, Planning Academic and Research Library Buildings; and (3) the committee's thorough investigation of, and sensitivity to, the needs of art librarians and visual resources curators who are currently responsible for facili

ties which must accommodate, and provide access to, our con

temporary book and image collections. To carefully address this third factor, the committee surveyed over 150 institutions to

identify the current status of their facilities and to extract in

formation pertaining to their facility-related needs. The needs

which were identified, and to which the standards in the publica tion are addressed, range from addressing the needs of hand

icapped users, to providing proper environmental conditions, to

appropriately accommodating electronic access to the collections.

As stated in the "Introduction to the Standards," the publica tion is designed to provide standards that are "devised to serve as

goals and measures of adequacy for physical facilities occupied by art libraries and visual resources collections. They may be used for comparative purposes to determine whether or not an

existing facility meets the standards or to plan for new, reno

vated, or remodeled facilities. Institutions or collections engaged in self-study processes should use the standards to evaluate and

to improve their facilities and services." The book, through its content and format, fulfills this purpose admirably. As the mate rial in the book is presented in a very straightforward manner, the format of the book allows the reader to easily extract infor

mation. The book is divided into four sections: the first section states 26 standards designed to meet the needs of facilities ac

commodating contemporary art historical and fine arts book and

image collections; the second section provides a selected bibli

I

ography of related reference works; the third section provides appendixes related to the research and findings of the commit tee; and the fourth section is an index to the volume. A par tial list of the standards formalized by the committee includes: needs assessment statement and building program, planning for expansion, architects and consultants, environment, disaster con

tingency planning, automation, reference and public catalog, periodicals, microforms, visual resources collections, photogra phy study collections, slides, film and video collections, photo copy and copystand areas, exhibition spaces, and furnishings and

equipment. The standards section is followed by a selected bibli ography organized by subject headings, which include the fol lowing: planning for new facilities and renovation/remodeling, consultants/architects, environment/conservation, automation, se

curity, interior design, furnishings and equipment, bookstacks,

handicapped access, signage, microforms, special libraries facili

ties, art and architecture library facilities, and visual resources

collections. Following the selected bibliography is a section of appendixes. Appendixes include the ARLIS/NA facilities ques tionnaire summary, sample disaster response plans, supplemen tary data for Standard 12-stacks, art book measurement survey, art exhibition catalogues measurement survey, and examples of

building programs and planning documents. The section of ap pendixes is followed by an index.

Because of my special interest in visual resources collections, I was especially interested in Standard 16, which states that "[vi sual resources collections may include slides, photographs, video,

microforms, films, and other media." From this primary stan

dard, 11 additional standards are formalized. These standards, with their respective commentaries, are articulated in a very readable and highly informative manner, thoroughly addressing the facility-related needs for such collections. The information is

well researched and, as reflected in the accompanying list of

references, displays an appreciation for recent research in the

field, notably Conservation Practices for Slide and Photograph Col lections: VRA Special Bulletin No. 3 [Visual Resources Association, 1989] by Christine Sundt, and Management for Visual Resources

Collections, by Nancy Schuller [Englewood, CO: Libraries Un limited, 1989]. A review of recent publications which address the needs of,

and provide standards for, dealing with facilities planning for visual resources collections, reveals that Schuller's publication,

Management for Visual Resources Collections, is the most significant publication to discuss in relationship to Facilities Standards for Art Libraries and Visual Resources Collections. In chapter two of Man

agement for Visual Resources Collections, titled "Facilities Planning," Schuller develops a "step by step approach to the physical design of the visual resources area." In so

doing, Schuller provides vi sual resources

professionals with a framework on which to build individualized facility planning strategies. Schuller's publication and Irvine's publication efficiently and effectively provide readers withan appreciation for the complexities inherent in planning,

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88 Art Documentation, Summer 1993

renovating, and maintaining facilities which accommodate art

libraries and visual resources collections.

Facilities Standards for Art Libraries and Visual Resources Collections

straightforwardly brings together and updates an indispensable amount of information addressing both "qualitative and quan titative standards," in a manner enabling the reader to easily venture into what can often be an overwhelming amount of

data. The volume is an invaluable reference tool for students,

newly assigned librarians and curators, and professionals in the

field.

Joy Blouin

University of Michigan

LEONARD'S ANNUAL PRICE INDEX OF PRINTS, POST ERS & PHOTOGRAPHS, Vol. 1 (July 1, 1991-June 30, 1992) / Edited by Katheryn Acerbo.?Newton, MA: Auction Index, 1993.?776 p.?ISBN 0-918819-31-8: $195.00.

Price guides for multiples multiply! This new index comple ments the coverage of Leonards Annual Price Index of Art Auctions, which has tabulated U. S. auction sales of paintings, drawings, and sculpture since the 1980-81 season. Among the many price guides to art auction sales, the publication of two new guides this year makes three devoted to prints and related multiples: Gor

dons Print Price Annual, Pr?nt Price Index, and Leonards Annual

Price Index. While Gordons Print Price Annual and the P?nt Price Index do not cover photographs, these are covered selectively by The Photographic Art Market: Auction Prices (1982?present). Cur

rently edited by Robert Persky and published by the Photo

graphic Arts Center in New York, this is a guide to the market rather than a comprehensive source for all photograph sales.

Each annual volume covers approximately 8 to 12 auctions by the leading dealers: Butterfield's, Sotheby's, Christies, and Swann

Galleries.

A critique of this newly published reference tool necessitates

comparison with similar indexes already on the market. The

format of this new publication is similar to Leonards Annual of Art Auctions. However, its geographic coverage is broader: the index

lists an international range of auction sales in Europe and Amer

ica. Like Gordons and the P?nt Price Index, Leonards covers Jap anese prints, an important and popular sector of the market.

Emphasizing artists' names in bold print with last names in capi tals at the head of the entry, the print format is readable in contrast to the tiny typeface of Gordons entries. Both P?nt Price

Index and Leonards Annual coverage follows the pattern of the

auction seasons, from the fall to early summer of the following

year; Gordon's lists sales from January to December of a single year, cutting across two seasons. Prices in dollars are listed in a

separate column in Leonards Index and converted into pounds, Deutsch marks, francs, and yen at the end of the entry. This

handling of currency conversions is a more practical solution

than the unwieldy tables of daily Wall Street Journal rates at the

beginning of Gordons Annual. The P?nt Price Index gives prices in three currencies in columns alongside each entry.

Leonards entries are superior to those in the other indexes

because of their amplitude. They contain detailed physical de

scriptions on the size, impression, condition, and paper type, often with accessory notes. Illustrations in the sales catalogue sources are noted, as they are in the other print price guides. In

many cases the full descriptions of the prints and photographs are all that is needed for appraisals and comparative pricing, so the necessity of consulting the original sale catalogue is obviated. A browse through Leonards, looking for familiar printmakers and photographers, reveals a number of suites, albums, and full

fledged books which happen to be the bearers of prints or pho tographs. In comparison, these are interfiled by artists' names in

Leonards, while the P?nt Price Index lists them separately under Books.

All three of the guides use a small number of genre and subject entries. These are useful if one knows to look for them. In Gordons, Portfolios contains a miscellaneous bag of early

prints, Derri?re le miroir editions, and other modern collections. The P?nt Price Index has eight categories usefully listed in its prefatory guide; these include botanical, topographical, and sport ing prints, and the genres of Japanese prints, books, portfolios, and posters. Under Posters, and Posters-Movies, Leonards lists a

large group of this genre for which artists are not known or were not given.

It is somewhat curious to group photographs with prints and posters. Although all three media tend to be printed on paper, the expertise required for photographs is quite different than for prints and posters. Following this distinction, Leonards glos sary is divided into three sections: General Terms on Condi tion, Papers, and Collecting; Print Media and Techniques; and Photography Media. There are other detailed guides to the terminology of acquisition and collection of prints and photo graphs, but as a one-stop source these 16 pages pack in much useful information. As noted in a previous review of Lawrences

Dealer P?nt Prices [Art Documentation 11, no. 4 (Winter 1992)], all the print auction and dealer sales guides have supplementary

materials, such as bibliographies of books on prints, occasional

essays of advice on collecting or investing in prints, and listings of selected monographs on some of the makers covered. One

might question whether it is appropriate to have a lot of ac cessory reference information in annual volumes of price guides, when it is so selective.

There is a need for authority control in the organization and rendering of names in Leonards Index. Artists' and photogra phers' names, catch-names of groups, workshops, commercial

establishments (e.g., Bauhaus), subjects, and place names (e.g.,

Augsburg, Oberrhein Oder) are interfiled with proper names. There are many variants of proper names, and these need to be

collocated under one form of the name followed by one alpha betical order of the works. Occasionally these names have lost their sense, as with the name of the Fluxus artist Ay-O, which is transformed into AY, O.

For librarians, curators, and collectors, the great usefulness of this volume is the precision of the citations linked to catalogues and the detailed description of the specific items sold. Leonards is valuable because of the extensive list of sales covered with dates, names, and numbers of the sales, the practical handling of cur

rency conversions with attention to additional percentages of

buyers' premiums, and the addresses, phone, and fax numbers of the auction houses, which are listed in full at the front of the volume. All three guides to print sales cover a slightly different group of auctions. For Leonards Index, the obvious big name that seems to have been omitted is the H?tel Drouot in Paris; how

ever, in fact these sales are listed separately under the individual

dealers' names.

The bottom line in decisions of which print sale price guide to

purchase may be price itself. ARLIS/NA members are offered an

introductory discount price of $97.50 (which has been extended beyond the initial closing date of March 15, 1992) to Leonards Index, and subscribers to both of the Leonard's auction sales

indexes may order the two titles for $395. Gordons Annual sells for $185; with a six-month update the price is $260. P?nt Price Index sells for $149.

So far, attempts to harness the sleeping giant of reference information on prints have focused on sale prices. But where do the prints go after the sales rooms and dealers shops? A far

more difficult venture is the location of specific prints in public institutions such as museums and library special collections. Any takers?

Marcia Reed

Getty Center

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