The National Gallery of Australia Research Library holds a wealth of printed ephemera, archives and audio interviews relating to Australian art and artists. In the late 1970s James Gleeson conducted nearly one hundred interviews with Australian artists whose works had been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. In the early 1990s, James Mollison, the Gallery's first Director, donated his personal papers to the Research Library. The Research Library’s ANZ Art & Artists files contain ephemera relating to over 30,000 Australian and New Zealand artists. Providing access to these unpublished records -archives, ephemera and oral history – is an imperative for the Australian visual arts.

We will discuss creating visibility of ephemera and archives and the extension to creating new digital resources for preservation and access. Partnerships for digitising materials will be explored along with impediments of copyright and current technology. The cataloguing of ephemeral holdings will be complemented with a discussion of a digital database of Australian art ephemera in partnership with Australian Galleries.

The role of oral history, and its significance will be illustrated by the James Gleeson Oral History Collection, recently inscribed into the Australian Memory of the World register. The digitisation of the audio cassettes was assisted by the National Library of Australia and ArtSound FM.

This paper covers three themes of the conference: - access, preservation and partnerships- and demonstrates how connections between all three are needed in order to create visibility for these rich and under-used resources held in art libraries across the country.