The Bibliography of Museum and Art Gallery Publications and audio-visual aids in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Jean Lambert (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Teanack, N.J.: Somerset House, 1977. £28) encourages me to consider some recent museum publications: publications for the most part that are catalogues of holdings in some way. But first a brief look at the Chadwyck-Healey publication. It describes itself as ‘a comprehensive biennial list of all types of material published and distributed by museums, art galleries and related institutions in Great Britain and Ireland’. It includes only material which is currently available for sale, loan or reference. It was compiled by questionnaire which leads to a certain lack of uniformity: some institutions, for instance, did not consider it necessary to include dates of publications. More than eight hundred institutions are included. The bibliography is divided into four sections: main entry, in which publications are listed alphabetically under their institutions; author index; title index; subject index. The snag of the last three, and particularly of the author index, is that the reader is referred only to the institution in which the author appears. This works quite well where a museum or gallery has published fairly little, but when faced with 12 pages of British Museum publications, or even 5 pages of Vaughan Williams Memorial Library publications, the job of scanning columns of small print and dense layout to find the required entry becomes daunting. Careful reading shows that many museums are still without available catalogues of their basic holdings. All the more interesting, therefore, to look at some of the catalogues that have been published recently.
Art on Tyneside