The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia, 1996 : Report

videos, currently totals 2296 catalogued items and forms a separate collection within the Library. Holdings of resources on both India and Taiwan were improved to reflect their inclusion in the Triennial. To provide indepth access to the resources in this collection, Library staff comprehensively catalogue and index group exhibition catalogues and books. This enables information on individual artists to be quickly and effectively retrieved from the Library's main database in response to requests from the Project Team and researchers. Selective indexing of journal articles from the main journals on contemporary art of the region as well as Australian and other international art journals also contributes to increased accessibility to information on the region and its artists which is not yet available through commercially produced art indexes. To date, 1428 articles from journals have been indexed. Increasingly the Library is receiving requests from outside researchers. However, the issue of making this collection and the associated databases more easily available to a wider external audience through the Internet is a priority. Asia-Pacific Artists Database The Asia-Pacific Artists Database is designed primarily to aid the Triennial Project Team and curators in locating and recording information about contemporary artists of the region. Available Gallery wide on the Local Area Network (LAN), the database currently holds 1586 records on individual artists. Information includes contact addresses, biography, exhibition history and a select bibliography. Library staff members and a temporary employee funded by the Triennial worked on information entry on this database in the lead up to the Second Triennial with additional information on Indian artists provided by a researcher. Information from this database was also used to create records for the Intranet site which was made accessible to the public during the Triennial. Artists in the region are encouraged through Triennial literature and the Internet site to send their CV for inclusion on the database. Asia-Pacific Project Database Like the Artists Database, the Project Database evolved from a more modest database used during the First Triennial to track the contact and itinerary details of the artists, speakers and guests. This database uses DBffextworks and is available to staff via the Gallery's Local Area Network (LAN). Developed jointly by the Library and Project Team, the database currently holds 2511 records. It is a multipurpose database, the uses of which range from providing addresses for correspondence to promotional mailouts by type of organisation or country to locating names of people with interests in a particular country or art practice. 6