ARLIS/NA 54th Annual Conference

While much has changed in librarianship in recent years, the need for thoughtful and innovative instruction has never been more important than now. Presenters in this session will discuss what library instruction looks like in 2026.

The Power of Pausing: Resisting AI Pressure Through Intentional Slowness
Speaker: Eva Sclippa

In an environment in which AI is being urgently pushed throughout academia, we have found that pausing offers a powerful means of resistance. Students are using generative AI, at times with institutional encouragement, without guidance about how to consider the larger ramifications on the artistic, academic, or information landscape, or on their own work and learning. At Boston University, colleagues spanning the libraries and the Educational Resource Center identified a pressing need for more informed decision-making about AI tool engagement, use, and intention. This led to the development of the “Pause Before You Prompt” tool for reflection before the point of algorithmic engagement.

Structured around seven concepts—ethics, consequences, privacy, copyright, transparency, personal motives, and accuracy—Pause Before You Prompt introduces mindful slowness into the AI use process. It provides students with key questions to address in advance of AI use to help them determine how or if to use generative AI products for their specific needs. We then built on this core framework to develop an accompanying assignment and in-class activity for instructors to incorporate into their courses.

Pause Before You Prompt has since been published in BU’s institutional repository and both library and writing instructor resources. Additionally, we successfully piloted the in-class activity with writing tutors on campus, who have now been trained to use it in their conversations with students. Meanwhile, other academic services have independently begun training their peer tutors in using Pause Before Your Prompt in their work with their fellow students. Faculty have demonstrated the tool within their own classes across disciplines. Other campus partners and stakeholders have expressed interest, including advising and student success teams and our Institute for Excellence in Teaching. Finally, library leadership has put forward a proposal for us to share Pause Before You Prompt with Boston University’s AI Development Accelerator as part of their AI developments symposium series.

During this session, we will discuss the process of creating this tool, with a particular focus on methods for assessing and organizing individual and institutional values. Attendees will have an opportunity to reflect on the values and questions about generative AI that they feel are most critical for members of their campus community to engage with, as well as methods for effectively reaching their students and colleagues in a period of accelerating change.

Zine workshops for Critical and Creative thinking in the Academic Library
Speakers: Sarah Wood-Gagnon, Lindsey Baker
In an age increasingly dominated by AI, digital communication, and surveillance capitalism, it is important to nurture in-person community building and tactile experiences. This presentation will highlight a series of zine-making workshops designed to engage students with experimental modes of learning and foster creativity within library environments. The idea arose from a growing interest in zines and crafting on campus. The workshops focus on diverse approaches to knowledge creation, encouraging participants to explore new ways of expressing ideas and remixing information through physical media. The workshop series beings with basic how-tos and distilling a research project into a zine for accessibility and concludes with more explicitly creative workshops on visual storytelling and poetry. This presentation will discuss how to stage these types of workshops, content covered and a selection of student work, and overall takeaways. We hope to highlight the importance of informal learning and making within the academic library.

Map Making and Treasure Hunting: understanding and supporting the information seeking behaviors of artist researchers
Speaker: Melanie Landsittel
In Map Making and Treasure Hunting: understanding and supporting the information seeking behaviors of artist researchers, Graduate Assistant Melanie Landsittel, MFA, aims to identify how research-based instruction in museums, galleries, and libraries has the potential to enrich studio-based visual arts education. She discusses the need for structured supplementary resources for studio-based learning, situated in frameworks like Research Creation and Practice-Led Scholarship. Drawing on her experience earning both the MFA and MLIS, she will share research tools in the form of a targeted workbook, student workshops structure, and results of a focus group analysis with visual arts student participants on the resources’ effectiveness.

Picture This: Collaborative approaches to visual literacy instruction
Speaker: Sara Ellis
“Picture This” outlines the development of an ongoing visual literacy workshop series at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Library. The ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education serve as an intellectual and pedagogical framework to anchor the series and the Art & Visual Literacy Librarian is positioned as project lead, collaboratively partnering with librarians and specialists in other units to plan and deliver visual literacy instruction. Core goals for the workshops include: identifying relevant research tools and strategies for developing visual literacy skills across disciplines, creatively and critically engaging with special collections and resources, reframing liaison and instructional partnerships, and providing opportunities to engage in dialogue while learning how to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Specific aspects of workshop planning and implementation are discussed while identifying challenges and successes that have emerged in the process.

We are living in the ludic century: an era of gamification, participatory culture, and play. Whether aware of it or not, most people engage with some kind of game – or gamified experience – every day. Video games have exceeded film and television as the most popular form of media, while the popularity of tabletop games – including role-playing games – is surging. How are information workers rising to meet the new standards for critical thinking and information literacy required to foster informed participants of these thriving and ever-present media? How can gamification tactics and participatory culture be harnessed to disrupt and expand information literacy services? How can game collections be curated and activated as new sites of research for art scholarship? Art and design libraries specifically hold a unique position of responsibility in this field as many of their users not only play - but intend to create - games. How are libraries stepping up to shape the future of this field? Hear from three information workers who have been spearheading innovative game collections, services, and research in their libraries.

The first presentation, Videoludic Literacies: How The SVA Libraries are Shaping the Future of Video Games, recounts the creation of a Retro Game Lounge at the School of Visual Arts, which marked the latest milestone in the continued development of the SVA Libraries' branch, Library West – a non-traditional library hub. This presentation will discuss how The Retro Game Lounge and its associated collections were conceived, planned, and built, with a focus on both the practical aspects and how it further realizes the communal, multimedia, and multimodal ethos of Library West.

The second presentation, LARPing in the Library: Activating Live Action Research Protocol, examines a collaboration between a librarian and art professor from Southern Methodist University who teamed up to create a research assignment that had students LARPing in the library. Students used various physical resources in the library to create a symbol and lore for their guild. This multi-session exercise disrupted students’ expectation that research in an academic setting would mirror their everyday searching behaviors.

The third presentation, "I've Experiments to Run, There is Research to be Done": The State of Video Game Collections in Academic Art Libraries addresses how academic art libraries are shaping the future of video game scholarship within the art history discipline – by virtue of what they deem relevant for entry into their collections. By identifying video game materials in the collections of research-focused academic art libraries, this presentation outlines which aspects of art historical video game research are currently supported, and which aspects of gaming's art culture are missing. Special attention is given to counterculture game creation including rom hacks and hardware mods as they have been largely absent from video game exhibitions.

This session contains a paper presentation followed by a pre-coordinated panel in English and French focusing on architecture and libraries.

“Designed to be Seen”: Revisiting Library Architecture and its Remnants of Colonial Legacies” - This presentation focuses on how library architecture buildings and their designs, often viewed with admiration and inspiration, may evoke colonial legacies. Like colonial museum architecture, colonial library architecture has parallel connections to imperialism in knowledge production and how such architecture portrays a particular aesthetic sensibility: an enduring symbol of imperial power and knowledge over colonized populations. Drawing on works of architectural historians and historians of empire, and case studies of libraries built in colonial-era regions, this presentation argues how library architecture did not only serve as a repository for colonial knowledge and practice in the imperial landscape but was designed in function and form to invoke imperial power in post-colonial societies.

From a different angle, the colonial legacy of library architecture relates to the larger idea that architecture is not neutral. Instead, architecture reflects cultural values, public needs, and urban change, and across Canada, buildings have been repurposed or demolished in response to shifting social priorities, economic forces, growth, and community resistance.

In the second part of this session, then, the bilingual panel will discuss the evolution of architecture in two major Canadian cities, Montréal and Toronto, through the lens of library and archival collections. Each panelist will highlight examples of architectural development, repurposing, and/or resistance held at their institution, encouraging discussion about the role libraries and special collections play in preserving Canada’s architectural history and its societal impact. Through textual documents, photographs, building records, maps, and other documents, libraries and archives provide evidence of these architectural evolutions, making them available for both studying the past and inspiring the future.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) will illustrate some of the architectural transformation in Montréal through Expo 67 islands and pavilions that have since been repurposed, such as the Pavilions of Québec and France. As well, they will highlight the Shaughnessy house, which similarly embodies this sense of adaptation. Built in the 19th century and once threatened with demolition, the mansion has now been restored and revived through its integration into a research institution. In different ways, these examples both demonstrate how architecture can be reimagined and sustained across generations and also highlight the cultural value embedded in the built environment.

The Eberhard Zeidler Library (University of Toronto) will highlight architectural resistance and development in Toronto through Ontario Place, a public entertainment space on Toronto’s waterfront since 1971, where redevelopment has recently become a point of civic debate. The topic of Ontario Place in our libraries and special collections demonstrates how resistance has shaped architecture and design in Toronto, from defending public space to establishing a cultural self-definition.
 
The first part of the panel will be in French and the second part in English. The slides will be bilingual. Questions in English and French are welcome. 
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