When the Royal Ulster Academy’s Diploma collection was last catalogued in 2000, the then President Richard Croft, mentioned in his foreword that the collection deserved to be housed in a gallery space where it would be on permanent exhibition. The Academy has changed a lot in the last twelve years and the public display of the Diploma Collection has been seen as a milestone on this evolutionary journey. It has been removed from long storage, dusted down, checked out and, crucially, added to before going up on the walls at River House in the centre of Belfast. This is as close to permanent exhibition as its been for many a long year. In its early days one of the conditions of election to the status of Academician within the RUA was the handing over of a worthy specimen of the artist’s work. Today, after some rationalising of the various categories of membership, we insist that all artist members are represented in the collection. The result is a large, an important and an ever-growing documentary on Irish art since the late 1800s.