Volume 31, Issue 3

So far, the new millennium has been a challenging one for preservation librarians. After having been the darling of librarianship for much of the 1980s and 1990s, we have had our comeuppance. The publication last year of Nicholson Barker's assault on librarians, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper , was an attack, staged in the mainstream media – and preceded in mid-2000 by the requisite piece of hubris in The New Yorker : ‘The author's desperate bid to save America's past’ – on the national preservation microfilming initiative. It was widely reviewed and discussed, and was even rumored (not realized, as it turned out) to be a likely recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

Introduction The Times (London) is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the English language. In the course of more than two centuries it has been a witness to the world's changing ideologies, its social and political constructs, its conflicts and creative endeavours. In the course of its life the newspaper has become an institution in its own right, on occasion reflecting the views of Britain's leaders and on others urging change with such confident authority that by the mid-19 th Century it had acquired the sobriquet of “The Thunderer.”

VAN EyCK (Visual Arts Network for the Exchange of Cultural Knowledge) is an online subscription database for the visual and applied arts. VAN EyCK intends to be a primary research resource for professionals involved in the arts: art historians/ researchers, museum professionals, auctioneers and art dealers. VAN EyCK contains almost 390,000 records, though it should be noted that 240,000 of these records are currently text based artist records, with 70,000 art object text records and 80,000 images. Van EyCK claims that the current focus on western art will expand in scope over time with an annual addition of 50,000. It is hoped that peer institutions will both subscribe to VAN EyCK and add images from their own collections to its database.