ARLIS/NA 54th Annual Conference

This panel, sponsored by the ARLIS/NA Critical Librarianship SIG, will feature presentations that critically engage the topic of artificial intelligence in technical services. As libraries and library workers are increasingly called upon to variously adopt, teach, or provide guidance on AI tools in our work, it is crucial that we also lead the way in critically assessing, and guiding others in critically assessing, the material conditions of artificial intelligence and its impacts on information integrity, intellectual property, civil discourse, and natural ecosystems.

Resisting the disruption: creating space to consider ‘AI’ in cataloging
Speaker: Amy Watson

This presentation will examine the push to adopt “AI” in cataloging. By decoding Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of disruption, library workers can create the space to evaluate the long-term sustainability and impact of “AI” technologies, develop ethical guidelines for their use, and imagine alternate pathways to address the needs driving the pressure to adopt “AI” in cataloging. Though focused on cataloging, the presentation will touch on core issues in critical librarianship and attendees will gain tools to begin resisting the disruption in their own library work.

Reimagining Metadata: Featuring an AI-Driven, Holistic Tool for Transformative Cataloguing and Discovery of Marginalized Collections
Speakers: Amy Andres, Liya Louis

GenXCat is an open-access, holistic, multilingual template series that integrates generative AI with human-in-the-loop oversight to create inclusive metadata for unique and underrepresented bibliographic and non-bibliographic collections. Developed in an academic art library, it addresses biases in AI-generated cataloging, resisting Anglophone dominance by enabling transliteration and multilingual description and culturally specific terminology while preserving cataloguer authority. GenXCat supports learning for new cataloguers, aligns with DEIA-AR values, and promotes ethical AI use while raising awareness of the limitations of current copyright laws and the need to reimagine copyright and policy frameworks. By broadening access to marginalized materials, it advances Universal Bibliographic Control and offers adaptable documentation for global library adoption.

Embodied Knowledge as Resistance: Designing Ethical AI for Cultural Heritage Archives
Speaker: Shan Chuah

This presentation examines an AI prototype developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services to support the cataloguing needs of the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources collections at Arizona State University. These collections span more than seventy years of rare ethnographic documentation and provide a vital record of movement-based traditions from many parts of the world. The project explores how automated video analysis and culturally informed metadata design can improve access to dance materials that are often compressed into a single undifferentiated category within cataloguing systems. By integrating Laban movement analysis frameworks, the work investigates how AI can enhance discovery while resisting reductive classification. The results indicate that intelligent chunking and targeted machine learning can reduce processing costs and expand technical capacity for institutions responsible for sizable non-textual heritage collections. At the same time, the project uses these technical outcomes to open a broader critical conversation about the values that shape automated systems. It considers how AI models interpret cultural material, how archival labor shifts when automation becomes a routine part of technical services, and how librarians may influence the ethical direction of these tools. Through this case study, the project proposes ways in which art librarians, as custodians of cultural memory, can guide AI toward practices that respect traditional knowledge systems and contribute to sustainable stewardship of embodied heritage.

Building and maintaining a library collection shapes how research is conducted now and in future generations. No library has infinite shelf space, so deciding what to purchase (and what to deaccession) is always an essential question. Presenters in this session will consider issues related to collection development in art libraries.

So you think you want a materials library?
Speaker: Morwenna Peters

Is a materials library essential to develop arts students’ materials and academic literacies? A research project funded by ARLIS UK & Ireland brought together a librarian, a technical manager and a materials library co-ordinator at two UK universities to investigate this question.

The project was underpinned by the researchers' shared ethos that using materials within teaching is relevant to: understanding a sustainable approach; developing critical thinking and reflective skills; and using materials and objects as a vehicle for learning.

Through a series of events, activities, visits and knowledge exchange opportunities, the researchers created a set of resources to support educators in confidently delivering materials literacy workshops in their own institutions. This presentation will share the context, outcomes (both planned and unexpected) and the next steps for this research project.

Stinky, Grubby, Graffitied, and WEIRD: A Visual Arts Weeding Success Story
Speaker: Andrea Johnston

Ah the joys of weeding. Time to review our collections, take stock of what is and isn’t moving, and embrace the mantra: out with the old and in with the new! While essential to managing our collections, weeding presents unique challenges, particularly with visual arts collections. From handling heavily used or damaged materials to navigating faculty communication and staff fatigue, the process can be both daunting and unexpectedly delightful.
This session recounts the presenter’s experience as a newly appointed Visual Arts Librarian at a mid-sized institution, tasked with revitalizing a collection that had not been reviewed in several years. The work involved not only weeding a neglected collection, but also included the work to advocate, promote, and preserve this unique and important section of the library.

Recognizing the distinctive nature of visual arts materials, the presenter developed a phased collection development and weeding strategy. This included crafting tailored weeding criteria, consulting with colleagues, and conducting hands-on review of materials to better understand the collection’s scope and needs. The phased approach was designed to minimize disruption, reduce staff fatigue, and support thoughtful decision-making.
This session will share lessons learned from the first phase of the project, completed in Spring 2025, and outline plans for future phases. Attendees will gain insights into developing visual arts-specific weeding guidelines, informed in part by criteria gleaned from a session presented during ARLIS/NA’s 2025 virtual conference, along with strategies for phasing a weeding project, and approaches to advocating for collection renewal and revitalization. Examples of surprising and humorous finds will be shared to illustrate the complexities and joys of this work.
Equal parts hilarious, enlightening, and gratifying, this session is ideal for librarians at small to mid-sized institutions looking for practical strategies to manage visual arts collections with creativity, care, and just the right amount of weird.

When everything was in flux, this library turned to Fluxus!
Speaker: Margaret English

Small and departmental libraries within large academic institutions are constantly under threat of amalgamation into main collections, or even closure. This paper will discuss the drastic cuts to space, collections and staff at one such library, and the strategies taken by the solo librarian to deal with the changes. The library made a quick pivot from being a resource for both undergraduate and graduate students and faculty to being a "Special Collection" with reduced hours. When everything was in flux, the library turned to Fluxus.

Rehearsal for presenters and award winners to review the Convocation and Awards Ceremony agenda and logistics.

For over 70 years, artists have used artists’ books to bypass conventional art world channels, ripe with gatekeeping, exclusion, and bias. Their unprecedented portability and accessibility allowed artists more agency over production and distribution. Artists’ books continue to be a vital mode of creative expression, particularly for exploring socio-political issues; however, the same qualities that make these works vibrant and democratic pose challenges for libraries. Artists’ books inherently resist traditional ways that libraries acquire, describe, and provide access.

This panel explores how librarians can navigate these challenges and remove barriers to engagement in artists’ books collections. We will present case studies from museum and academic libraries, along with historical examples, to demonstrate how artists’ books can be promoted as essential library materials and how we can work together to steward these collections for future generations. By opening the doors to artists’ books collections, we can champion underengaged perspectives and allow more users to see themselves in our holdings.

From Activism to Access: Resisting the Status Quo with Artists' Books
Speaker: Joey Vincennie

By examining the history of activism through the lens of artists' books, this presentation aims to show how this form was used as a tool for uncensored artistic expression and consciousness-raising. Drawing parallels from historical examples to contemporary artists’ books, we explore how these objects circumvent the hegemony of traditional art and publishing structures and act as vehicles for socio-political activism, arguing that artists' books in library collections push back against limits to expression. By revising access policies for artist book collections, participating in art book fairs, promoting artists’ books through programming, and supporting small publishers, the author aims to show how librarians can resist the gatekeeping of information, ideas, and access.

The Role of Research in Undergraduate Studio Practice: A Qualitative Study
Speaker: Giana Ricci

The inherent challenges of collecting artists’ books for circulating academic libraries often deter librarians from considering them for inclusion. At New York University Libraries, we see an opportunity to interrogate existing methods of collecting that may exclude or discourage creative research in higher education. In this presentation, I will discuss original qualitative research concluding that student artists are keen to use non-traditional resources in their creative practices, but that library conventions may limit their engagement. I will propose ways we can resist these conventions, while maintaining professional standards, in order to bring artists’ books and other creative resources into the hands of our users.

Mentorship and Meaning in a Museum Library Special Collections
Speaker: Ivy Blackman

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Frances Mulhall Achilles Library offers our student interns a rare opportunity to select and present artists’ books to an audience of museum professionals as a part of their participation in our program. Their selections and research are used as the basis for special collections and artists’ books education for the following year. The project invites students into the meaningful work of artists’ books research and curation, and provides a useful model for engaging emerging professionals in work with artists' books that goes well beyond paging and shelving. This presentation discusses the ways in which removing barriers to pre-professional work with artists' books has proven fruitful for our interns, our staff, and our understanding of our collections.

How do libraries and archives reflect and capture our current moment? Papers in this session will cover topics including AIDS, music and web archiving.

Art, Archives, and the Long Tail of HIV & AIDS Artistic Production
Speaker: Emilie Hardman

This paper examines an open digital collection documenting the artistic legacy produced by the HIV & AIDS crisis and its long, continuous tail as a case study in resistance enacted through form rather than resolution. Bringing into proximity materials drawn from community archives, personal holdings, and dispersed institutional collections, the corpus spans four decades of cultural production and includes fine art, artist books, essays, agitprop, performance documentation, oral histories, and other traces of embodied cultural artmaking generated under conditions of crisis, stigma, loss, and collective care.

Rather than presenting a coherent institutional archive or a curated digital exhibition, the collection operates as a deliberately heterogeneous body of work. Its materials were never meant to sit quietly beside one another, nor to be stabilized into a singular narrative of artistic response. Their digital co-presence foregrounds unevenness--differences in provenance, scale, documentation, and preservation that are not reconciled but held in view. This heterogeneity is not treated as a problem to be solved, but as a defining condition of the collection’s intellectual and interpretive potential.

The paper explores the opportunities this structure creates for engaging with cultural memory that remains unfinished. It attends to how the collection makes visible forms of cultural production that persist unevenly, circulate through personal and community care, and resist being safely historicized. Attention is given to how context can be provided without imposing closure, how absence and loss function as constitutive features of the record, and how crisis-born cultural expression can be made accessible without being converted into settled heritage.

Rather than offering resolution, the collection creates space for ongoing interpretation, reuse, and scholarly encounter. The paper argues that such openness (structural, descriptive, and interpretive) allows the collection to sustain unresolved cultural legacies and to support new forms of engagement with the artistic afterlives of HIV & AIDS.

Building a Global Digital Archive for Popular Music and Culture Zines
Speaker: Elizabeth Martin-Ruiz

In 2015, a non-profit music research organization took the initiative to establish an international and multilingual digital archive of independently published fanzines and magazines dedicated to popular music and culture. These zines cover a wide variety of related topics, accompanied by visual art such as comics, drawings, and photography, and all captured in unique graphic design. This presentation will chronicle the multifaceted journey, from securing licensing rights and converting content from print to digital format to developing an innovative platform that ensures long-term preservation and intuitive user searching. I will then highlight how the platform design facilitates the discovery of a diverse range of content and makes content accessible to a wide range of users. Recently launched, the archive offers an opportunity to provide insight into the technical, legal, and curatorial challenges associated with such an undertaking. It ultimately attests to the complexities of building a global digital resource for interdisciplinary scholarship.

Punk Rock & Resistance: Documenting Decades of Defiance in an International Zine Archive
Speaker: Jacqueline Santos

The visual punk rock aesthetics of the late 20th and early 21st century draw on themes of free expression, feminism and gender non-conformism, anti-establishmentarianism and political criticism, as well as liberation. These themes are likewise prevalent in zines—noncommercial, frequently homemade publications usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subjects. Emerging in opposition to established publications of their respective eras, zines amplified voices of resistance during periods of censorship, economic disparity, racial inequality, and political unrest. This paper presents examples of visual archival zine content within the scope of these themes, and especially related to “resistance”, to underscore the importance of community-based archival practices in preserving underrepresented historical and current perspectives. Using a digital zine archive as a case in point, it demonstrates how zine archives function as cross-disciplinary resources for institutions, students, and scholars beyond their graphic content and make accessible material of artistic expression of marginalized groups that remains urgently relevant today.

Resisting Ephemerality: Web Archiving Online Arts Content Before It Disappears
Speakers: Sarah Beth Seymore, Sumitra Duncan

Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on the records of artists, galleries, museums, and arts organizations to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. Yet, much of the art-related materials that were once published in print are now often available primarily or solely on the web and are highly ephemeral by nature. This presentation will articulate the scale and urgency of this problem and why it matters for librarians and archivists working with collections related to the arts. Speakers will provide an overview of the challenges and opportunities of web archiving online arts content and present practical methods for attendees to begin working to preserve these valuable resources. Details will be shared about the launch of a new initiative that will allow ARLIS/NA members to nominate arts websites with enduring value for long-term preservation and access through the CARTA (Collaborative ART Archive) program from the Internet Archive.

"Please join us for the 54nd annual ARLIS/NA Convocation & Awards Ceremony. Our convocation keynote speaker will be the renowned artist Angela Graurholz.

Artist/photographer and graphic designer Angela Grauerholz has been living and working in Montreal since 1976. She was a founding member of ARTEXTE and has worked as a designer for art magazines, museums and artists throughout the 80s. As Full Professor at the École de design Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)—where she also directed the Centre de design (2008 to 2012)—she taught typography and photography from 1988 to 2017. In 2019, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver awarded her an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, and more recently, UQAM bestowed upon her the title of Professor Emerita.
Her artistic work has been exhibited and collected widely in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She has participated in many international events of distinction including the Sydney Biennale (1990), Documenta IX (1992), the Carnegie International (1995) and the Montréal Biennale (2004). She was awarded a number of prestigious prizes for her accomplishments in the arts, such as Québec’s Prix Paul-Émile Borduas (2006), the Canada Council’s Governor General Award in Visual and Media Arts (2014), and in 2015, the distinguished Scotiabank Photography Award (Toronto).
Amongst a selection of many solo exhibitions, her work was shown at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, (Münster, 1991), the MIT List Visual Arts Center, (Cambridge, MA, 1993), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, 1999), the Power Plant (Toronto, 1999), the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College (Chicago, 1999), the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston (2004), VOX, Contemporary Image Centre, Montreal (2006), and the Vancouver Public Library (2008). Angela Grauerholz (photographies 1990 – 1995), a survey exhibition organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1995, travelled to several institutions in Canada, Germany, Swizerland, and France (1995-96). In 2010, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa mounted a retrospective exhibition of her work, consequently shown at the University of Toronto Art Center in 2011. In conjunction with the Scotiabank Photography Award, the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto also put together another important survey exhibition (2016).

L'artiste/photographe et graphiste Angela Grauerholz vit et travaille à Montréal depuis 1976. Elle a été membre fondatrice d'ARTEXTE et a travaillé comme graphiste pour des magazines d'art, des musées et des artistes tout au long des années 80. Professeure titulaire à l'École de design de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), où elle a également dirigé le Centre de design (de 2008 à 2012), elle a enseigné la typographie et la photographie de 1988 à 2017. En 2019, l'Université d'art et de design Emily Carr lui a décerné un doctorat honorifique en lettres, et plus récemment, l'UQAM lui a conféré le titre d'émérite.

Son travail artistique a été largement exposé et collectionné au Canada, aux États-Unis et en Europe. Elle a participé à de nombreux événements internationaux prestigieux, notamment la Biennale de Sydney (1990), la Documenta IX (1992), la Carnegie International (1995) et la Biennale de Montréal (2004). Elle a reçu plusieurs prix prestigieux pour ses réalisations dans le domaine des arts, tels que le Prix Paul-Émile Borduas du Québec (2006), le Prix du Gouverneur général en arts visuels et médiatiques du Conseil des Arts du Canada (2014) et, en 2015, le prestigieux Prix Scotiabank de la photographie (Toronto)."

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