ARLIS/NA 48th Annual Conference

What initiatives can we, as librarians, educators, museum professionals, archivists, and curators, take to create research opportunities, raise awareness, and provide access to art publishing on a national scale?
This panel examines two initiatives that art librarians from Canadian universities have undertaken at individual and institutional levels. The approaches seek to enrich bibliographic information about, and exhibition histories of, Canadian artists while improving access to reference publications and collections.
John discusses ongoing research into a reference publication and artist book titled Who Was Who Was Who in Contemporary Canadian Art. This print and Open Access book draws on work from a research residency at Artexte and subsequent contact with art libraries across Canada. A biographical dictionary of Canadian artists and their pseudonyms, it explores intersections of academic enquiry and art making while offering a critical framework for reconsidering traditional biographic approaches to art history.
Sara discusses re-development of the Canadian Art Exhibition Catalogue Collection at the University of British Columbia Music, Art & Architecture Library. This reference collection preserves historic catalogues and is a record of art practice in Canada, with strong regional representation. It compiles items previously dispersed in the library system and reinvigorates promotion of Canadian art in a high-profile reading room enriched with iconic imagery through collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Both case studies offer opportunities for research, record keeping, and pedagogy, outlining the potential for new ways of relaying information in support of academic research and creative process.

Learning Objectives:
• How to conceptualize art publishing as an evolving area of research and artistic practice.
• Collaborating with subject specialists and arts organizations to build cross-institutional research networks.
• Methods for documenting and providing access to information about artists, art making, and exhibition histories.
• Strategies through case study – and future possibilities – for assessment, collection development, preservation, and resource sharing.

Recent years have seen a growth in collaborations between art librarians, special collections curators, and other academic partners to enhance and reimagine student interaction with and creation of visual materials. Collaboration, visual literacy, active learning, critical thinking, and student engagement are key to the success of these endeavors.
In Exhibiting STEAM: Engaging Art Librarianship in the STEM Narrative, Hilles and Boehme will discuss two exhibitions they spearheaded which created dialogues between arts and sciences. In one, they highlighted the photographs of microscopic subjects created by faculty and students, and, in the other, they curated an artist books’ exhibit where science served as inspiration and subject.

In Polaroids from Heaven: Experiential Learning with Special Collections, Ewalt will present on the methods and pedagogies she employs in visual literacy instruction to help students analyze and draw inspiration from photographs of Marian apparitions and supernatural phenomenon.

Leousis and Schmidt will discuss their collaboration, in Reimagining the Special Collections Classroom: Creating an Active Learning Laboratory for Art, Architecture, and Design Students, where they use a flipped classroom approach and hands-on activities to create student-centered and student-led workshops, in which students analyze and engage with visual materials from special collections.

In Hybrid Symbols of Identity and the Royal Chicano Air Force: Integrating Information Competencies in an Intermediate Studio Art Class Using University Library Archives and Special Collections, Harper and Ventis will present on a project in which printmaking students evaluate how Chicano identity was created and constructed in the RCAF poster collection, and students then create images incorporating symbols related to their own hybrid identities.

This panel will focus on current trends and challenges of five of the larger encyclopedic art museum libraries in the United States. Their directors will represent the libraries. The participants will address major issues, challenges and initiatives in their libraries, including leadership and management, organizational development and change, outreach and programming, collection development and management. The panel’s goal is to give an overview of the current challenges and initiatives that are shared in all libraries, especially large art museum libraries, but topics will be coordinated in advance so that speakers can bring out the priorities, initiatives and features that are characteristic of the individual library.

RDA and the RDA Toolkit have undergone a substantial revision known as the 3R project (RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign). This revision impacts how catalogers apply RDA and significantly alters how they access content and instructions in the RDA Toolkit. Members of the ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee will present the updates to RDA and the major conceptual and functional changes made to the Toolkit with a focus on the needs of art catalogers. Panelists will also present on the Cataloging Advisory Committee’s efforts to propose changes to RDA, on the creation of an RDA Toolkit application profile for cataloging art material, and the committee’s ongoing revision of the "Cataloging exhibition publications: best practices" document (published by ARLIS/NA in 2010) to comply with the new RDA standards. Time will be allotted for questions and the opportunity to discuss potential future proposals for changes and additions to RDA our community would like to see incorporated.

Art librarians are always looking for ways to engage patrons in inventive learning opportunities around information and visual literacies outside of the classroom instruction structure. This panel brings together three librarians who will share projects intentionally designed to create these opportunities using a range of innovative approaches. The panelists will share their insights into how they have successfully implemented new ways of reaching out, as well as best practices for those who would like to try something similar. David Greene will discuss how art librarians can employ design thinking to create information literacy video tutorials that best suit the unique needs of their patrons. Participants will learn strategies that will help keep their tutorials clear, succinct, visually appealing, and easy to maintain as the need for edits and modifications inevitably arise. Maggie Murphy will explore the idea of interdisciplinary visual literacy instruction for undergraduate students outside of art and design disciplines through co-curricular programming on memes. Using a grant-funded project she developed with colleagues Jenny Dale and Brown Biggers as a model, she will discuss how memes can serve as a lens for talking about information ethics, creativity, rhetorical strategies, critical evaluation, and more, in relation to artistic practice, everyday visual culture, and digital communication. Katy Parker, former Research and Instruction Librarian at the Savannah College of Art and Design, will share methods for tying information literacy, collection development, and outreach planning into one project to benefit the diverse needs of art and design students through a project to develop the tabletop RPG collection at the Jen Library.