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.
