ARLIS/NA 48th Annual Conference

To work in technical services is to face a never-ending battle against innumerable foes. Every technical services team in an art library faces the same epic dilemma: how to demonstrate your worth to your institution. You know how ruthlessly efficient your workflows are, but how can you prove it to the world? Without being able to compare against other units in other institutions, your only point of comparison is yourself, which means every success sets the bar higher next time.

In this interactive panel, presenters from technical services units in art libraries of varying sizes and institutions, from large museum libraries to mid-sized academic libraries to solo librarian situations, will present actual data from their libraries, with varieties of data visualizations. We’ll discuss how to create meaningful metrics for core tech services functions that are rarely reported on, to demonstrate activity levels, and some simple visualizations that help tell your tale. Then we’ll talk about how we can find data points for benchmarking activity to compare across institutions, and how session participants and others can plan to do this as a group moving forward. Following that, we’ll open the floor for discussion of how best to present the data you have for your library. Let mortal heroes tell your tale of tech services triumph!

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.