ARLIS/NA 48th Annual Conference

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.

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.