ARLIS/NA 54th Annual Conference

Join the Conference Planning Advisory Committee (CPAC) live from Concordia University’s 4TH SPACE, a vibrant public venue in the heart of downtown Montreal dedicated to research, learning, and community engagement. This free virtual pre-conference day will be available via Zoom, where attendees can interact with speakers, or by livestream on YouTube. Open to members and non-members alike, this event does not require registration for the Montréal conference.

The event is from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. See the full schedule for the event by following this link.

Register using this Zoom registration link for the entire session from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.
Livestream link for the entire session from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.

Research libraries stage exhibitions that resist silence, amplify marginalized voices and invite new forms of public dialogue. Far from neutral, library exhibitions are increasingly important as pedagogical, political and cultural interventions. This panel will explore how exhibitions rooted in library collections and curatorial practice function as acts of resistance–whether to institutional inertia, political censorship or canonical narratives.

Exhibiting Resistance: Experiential Learning through Archival Curation
Speaker: Sam Regal
This paper presents a student internship program at a large public research university, where an undergraduate curated an exhibition from archival protest ephemera. The project connected current student activism with institutional legacies of resistance, transforming the library into a site of dialogue between past and present struggles.

Curation in Academic Art Libraries: Empowering Students and Promoting New Forms of Storytelling
Speaker: Anaïs Grateau
The paper considers how student-led exhibitions resist static art-historical narratives and challenge the notion of art libraries as apolitical spaces. Through case studies of collaborative curatorial projects, the paper highlights exhibitions-as-pedagogy, positioning students as active meaning-makers who shape interpretive frameworks for diverse audiences.

I Object: Activist History, Library Exhibitions and Art
Speakers: Courtney Hunt and Leticia Wiggins
This paper presents a case study of an exhibition that merged archival collections with contemporary feminist art to foreground the activist history of an R1 university campus. Staged amid state-level restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the project demonstrates how art libraries can serve as sites of cultural resistance under conditions of political constraint.

Widening the Arc: Drawing on the Full Spectrum of Library Collections
Speaker: Jamie Vander Broek
This paper examines an exhibition that resisted the conventional privileging of “treasures” by displaying scientific works alongside mass-produced children’s books, and by inviting visitors to handle materials directly. By dismantling the hierarchy between special and circulating collections, the project demonstrates how library exhibitions can resist entrenched curatorial orthodoxies and reframe everyday materials as vital sources of public knowledge.

The event is from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. See the full schedule for the event by following this link.

Register using this Zoom registration link for the entire session from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.
Livestream link for the entire session from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.

This open members’ meeting will offer attendees an overview of ARLIS/NA’s current priorities, activities, and leadership updates for the 2025–2026 program year. The session will begin with the President’s welcome and report, followed by reports from the Secretary, Treasurer, Development Committee, and Editorial Director, offering updates on the association’s governance, finances, fundraising, and publications. Together, these presentations will give members an opportunity to learn more about the work of the association and stay connected to its ongoing initiatives. The session will conclude with a presentation and question period on travelling to Montréal for the conference, featuring representatives from the Conference Planning Advisory Committee and the Advocacy and Public Policy Committee.

The event is from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. See the full schedule for the event by following this link.

Register using this Zoom registration link for the entire session from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.
Livestream link for the entire session from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.

Centering on makers and forms, this panel considers how artists’ books can be viewed as sites of resistance. The impulse to generate such books is sparked by artistic ideas rather than practicality, their modes of creation defy traditional publishing norms, and their physical shapes often circumvent the limits of the codex. Artists’ books are neither solely books nor solely art. They exist as unique or multiple copies. In a digital age, they are meant to be tactile, experienced as material objects in intimate proximity to human hands. They evade formal display in casework. Artists’ books allow for experimentation. Their textures, media, structures, and narratives can be idiosyncratic and varied. Their networks of distribution can be conventional or alternative.

The first panelist, Christine Walde, will show how artist’s books defy categorization. Walde frames artists’ books as outliers that defy norms, exploring how the form of the book across titles such as Clive Philpott's Fruit Salad, Andy Warhol's Index (Book), and Ben Denzer's 20 Slices, acts as a perfect site of resistance.

Next, Caroline Clavell will speak to the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, a not-for-profit guild of artists founded as a Discord server during the COVID-19 pandemic, and engaged in binding fannish works under the idea of fandom gift economy. Rejecting the idea of publishing as a purely commercial endeavor, the guild preserves the ephemeral in print as a labor of love and anchors a community that freely shares resources and tutorials.

Finally, Nemo Xu will present on the inaugural catalogue for Behind VA Shadows (BVAS), a public art project founded as an autonomous choice by a group of frontline staff at the ICA/Boston to celebrate the dual identity as artists and museum workers. Xu shares how the collaborators considered what records would be necessary and adequate to tell the story of BVAS, to preserve the history and experience of their grassroots project, and resist disappearance.

Weaving together insights into physical forms and creation processes, the lived experiences of creatives and cultural caretakers, from the recent past to the present day, the panel frames artists’ books as contemporarily relevant and rich with possibilities for defiance.

This roundtable session is a follow-up to the first "Reference in Art Libraries: a roundtable discussion" offered at the ARLIS Conference 2024 in Pittsburgh. Reference providers will lead discussion by answering questions investigating the current state of reference collections and services offered in art libraries, as well as reflecting back on changing approaches over time. Speakers will contribute examples from their work weeding, shifting, adjusting collections, and providing research consultations with students and researchers. The theme of resistance will also inform these conversations. Are we resisting traditional approaches to reference services and spaces? How can providing reference interactions push back against AI offerings of research support? This program is also timely as the end of 2025 marked the 20th anniversary of "Guide to the Literature of Art History" volume 2 (ALA Editions, 2005).

Special collections bring their own (special) challenges and opportunities. This session will cover topics related to managing special collections in libraries.

The #GayAgenda: LGBTQIA2S+ materials in the Murray & Hong Special Collections at Michigan State University Libraries
Speakers: Nicole Smeltekop and Eli Landaverde
MSU Libraries Special Collections began collecting radicalism and activism materials in the late 1960s. The large amount of LGBTQIA2S+ materials collected over four decades remained dormant and the collection had not been kept up to date until the appointment of a curator in 2018. This paper presentation will discuss assessing previous collection development decisions, setting collection development priorities for the collection, and expanding cataloging practice beyond inventorying to follow more current practice. This will include details on conducting a collection analysis to identify gaps in the collection, developing policies that include ensuring various experiences and identities were represented in the collection, and cataloging material focused on the LGBTQIA2S+ community ethically and empathetically. A focus for the examples will be on the art prints and posters collected, many from lesser-known artists. The cataloging part of the presentation will include tips for working with this material - including a list of best-practices and resources, using both Library of Congress Subject Headings and Homosaurus as controlled vocabularies, and considerations when creating Library of Congress Name Authority File headings for underrepresented groups.

Photobooks as Resistant Objects: Politics, Propaganda, and the Colonial Gaze
Speaker: Margherita Naim
Many library holdings worldwide include photobooks on politically significant topics from several historical periods and regions of the world. At times, these photobooks can be considered sensitive materials due to both contained images and accompanying texts. This may be the case with war and propaganda materials, photojournalistic reports, or publications originating from colonial contexts. As such, these photobooks must be viewed not only as particularly significant sources for research into the history of photography, but also within a transdisciplinary framework.
I refer to them as ‘Resistant Objects’ (Thomas, K. and Gu, J. H., ‘Resistant Objects’, Conversation, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, October 10, 2025), as they hold a resistant potential in reframing perspectives on historical narratives as well as reconstructing creative processes.
In this context, I would like to present a case study from the Martin Salter Collection, a private collection of photobooks recently acquired by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI). The collection consists primarily of photographers’ monographs from a wide range of countries, veritable book objects, some of them very rare. An overview of the ‘Resistant Photobooks’ included in this collection will be matched by descriptions of other photobooks held by the KHI, and by other libraries.

What’s in an Artist File? The Future of Artist Files
Speakers: Amelia Nelson, Alexandra Reigle, Kathleen O'Reilly, and Bridget O’Keefe
Artists’ files are a uniquely rich and dynamic resource, that may include zines, correspondence, artist statements, exhibition ephemera, and other documentation that illuminate artists’ careers and practices. Despite their significant research value, the idiosyncratic nature of their content and varied methods of acquisition often present challenges for libraries.
Increased attention to documenting regional artists, particularly those historically underrepresented in traditional art historical narratives, has underscored the critical importance of artist files. In many cases, these files serve as the only record of underrecognized artists, regionally significant artists, and artist-run spaces. In this presentation, members of the Artist File SIG will share and synthesize the results of a survey of institutions that collect artist files to provide a snapshot of current practices, perceived value, and resource needs. Building on these findings, SIG members will propose community-driven best practices and tools to support those responsible for creating, maintaining, and activating artist files.

This panel explores feminist resistance as practiced by artists whose work and lives are documented in archival collections at the Getty Research Institute, examining how their creative, political, and bodily interventions challenged prevailing cultural narratives around gender, sexuality, power, and representation. Drawing on the papers of feminist artists, as well as digital and programmatic approaches to engaging feminist legacies, the panel demonstrates how resistance takes form—materially, performatively, and structurally—through art, writing, and institutional activism.

The first presentation, The Female Experience: Works by Faith Wilding and subRosa, explores the papers of an artist whose solo and collaborative projects focus on critiquing dominant perceptions of women’s health and social identities. Through performance, installation, activist interventions, writing, and pedagogy, Wilding and subRosa challenge societal views of women’s bodies and traditional roles. This feminist resistance is documented in an array of materials in Wilding’s archive—from cyberfeminist websites, workbooks, and videos to installations and solo performances reflecting on both mundane and distinctive female experiences.

The second presentation, Harmony Hammond and the Work of Making Space, examines the papers of a multidisciplinary feminist artist who mounted sustained resistance to the erasure of lesbian identity in the art world. Through interconnected strategies—including co-founding A.I.R. Gallery and the Heresies Collective, publishing Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000), and maintaining her own creative practice—she challenged institutional exclusion on multiple fronts. Hammond’s archive reveals how her scholarly interventions, institutional activism, and artistic works operated as acts of resistance against systemic marginalization.

The third presentation, Resisting Erasure: Institutional Strategies to Support Feminist Art Historical Research, addresses institutional approaches that support feminist research, examining strategies that facilitate scholarly investigation into women’s artistic practices and resistances. As part of a larger research project that aims to examine the relationship between feminist performance art and its archives, this presentation will focus on the various ways that the research project has aimed to share resources pertaining to the holdings at our research institution. The speaker will primarily highlight the newly revised and expanded LibGuide on feminist archival resources, which was updated to bring attention to latent stories within our institutional collections and to take a feminist approach to historiography and the erasure of histories in the artistic canon. Throughout, the speaker will reveal the considerations underpinning decisions around accessibility within the shifting political landscape in the U.S.

The fourth presentation, Valentines for a Feminist Future, addresses programmatic initiatives that activate these feminist archives, with particular emphasis on networks of care and issues of bodily autonomy. Inspired by our collections of women artists’ archives, the speaker will describe events and partnerships that serve to illuminate the histories of feminist activism and resilience with the urgency of our contemporary moment.

Taken together, these presentations demonstrate how libraries and archives function as essential sites for preserving and activating feminist resistance practices. Through research, cataloging, and dissemination, the resistance strategies documented in these archives continue to contribute to the vital work of contemporary cultural workers.

Exploring Wikidata’s Potential for Managing Artist Identities at the National Gallery of Art Library
Speakers: Jung Soo Bae, Amy Watson, Emily Sawyer

The Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) has traditionally offered centralized, standardized authority control of artist names, artwork titles, and subjects in library metadata. Built on human-readable, string-based access points and controlled vocabularies, these legacy records are less adaptable to today’s interconnected information environment. Furthermore, the training and review process required to contribute to the LCNAF can pose barriers to participation and slow innovation.  

In response, libraries have begun working collaboratively to explore a shift from traditional authority control toward more flexible, URI-based entity management within a Linked Open Data (LOD) framework. The Entity Management Cooperative (EMCO) Early Adopters Program supports this transition by promoting interoperability and discoverability of authority data in LOD ecosystems, developing shared data models for entity description, and supporting community-driven experimentation.

As part of this program, the National Gallery of Art Library conducted a pilot project to assess the potential for the management of artist identities in Wikidata in comparison to LCNAF. This presentation outlines our workflows and highlights key findings, including challenges encountered and opportunities uncovered, and provides practical insights for institutions considering similar approaches. 

Enhancing Records, Expanding Access
Speakers: William Blueher, Daisy Paul

Cataloging is a shared enterprise. A bibliographic record created by one cataloger in Connexion can be added to and enriched by catalogers around the world. But if your library catalog is not synched to Connexion, many of these bibliographic enhancements – things like summary notes and tables of contents – won't ever appear in your records. We work in one such library, so we developed a process for adding these enhancements (specifically the 505 and 520 fields, though the process could be adapted to work for other fields as well) from Connexion records into our integrated library system.

Since implementing this workflow, we’ve enhanced thousands of records in our catalog, greatly increasing the accessibility and discoverability of our collection. While it is an involved process, we have broken it down into manageable steps that other libraries will be able to replicate and modify to their own needs. In addition to Connexion, we relied on open-access tools such as MarcEdit and Notepad++ to efficiently batch edit data.

We will provide a detailed report on the impact this workflow has had on our library catalog. We will examine not only the number of enhanced records but also provide a breakdown of what types of records have the highest probability of having available enhancements, allowing for a more targeted implementation of this workflow. We will also provide access to step-by-step documentation so that the audience can replicate this work at their institutions.

Just as cataloging is a shared enterprise, we believe these sorts of technical workflows ought to be as well.

Hidden in History : Curating a Featured Collection for Indigenous Architecture Library Materials
Speakers: Aubree Tillett, Tina Gross

There are few books documenting the architecture of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas from an Indigenous perspective. Last year the Design Librarian experienced difficulty locating enough materials related to Indigenous architecture to create a robust book display that had been requested to support the Minnesota American Institute of Architects (AIA) Indigenous Design Camp. A more comprehensive search of the library catalog was initiated and colleagues with subject and cataloging expertise were consulted. Through this process it became clear that most of the books with information about Indigenous architecture in the library collections are not assigned a Library of Congress Classification of NA for Architecture. Instead they were cataloged with LC classifications for E and F: History of the Americas. Academic libraries' indiscriminate adoption of LC cataloging tools and practices, such as ""collocating"" resources about Indigenous Peoples' practices in specific areas (such as architecture, astronomy, education, medicine, etc.) with resources about that Indigenous group rather than with the specific endeavor, has significant drawbacks. Within the University of Minnesota Libraries, books classified as history and social sciences are held in different libraries spanning three distinct geographic locations. Additionally, the items related to architecture in E and F are not next to each other on the shelves in the same library; the materials are first organized by Indigenous community then architecture. The separation of related items creates barriers to browsing and the serendipitous discovery of books related to Indigenous Architecture.

This session will explore one solution to overcoming these barriers, a digital featured collection created to showcase Indigenous architecture. Presenters will share their process for identifying and selecting items in the library catalog for the featured collection They will share the inclusion criteria; item review process; and their observations of items ultimately comprising the final collection. Many of the resources in the final list are archaeological, anthropological, or historical sources rather than design-focused materials due to the destruction, appropriation, and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, knowledge, and cultural practices. The authors will address the ethical considerations of choosing to include books in the collection that document cultures and civilizations with a historical and often colonialist lens when the Indigenous perspective is not available.

DIY In the Stacks: Building a Circulating Zine Collection from Scratch to Success
Speakers: Claire Payne, Amanda Tillapaugh

In summer 2024, Amanda, the new serials acquisitions specialist at RIT Libraries, approached Claire, the art and design librarian, with an idea: could we circulate zines at the library? Claire had asked herself the same question a few times in the preceding few years, as it had become clear that zines were a popular format for student expression on campus. However, it had seemed like creating a new collection would make unwelcome or impossible demands on staff time and library resources. Amanda, as a serials specialist, had a suggestion: what if zines were treated like serials? Instead of being cataloged individually, zines could come in and out of the collection more casually, reflective of the often ephemeral nature of the publications themselves.

In this presentation, the speakers will detail how a change in cataloging approach allowed us to ideate and develop a circulating zine collection from scratch to success in a one-year time frame. By bringing together a small cross-departmental team and using existing resources creatively, the library has built a (still-growing) collection of approximately 150 zines that successfully engages our campus community. While not a no-cost project, this talk will provide a model for creating a worthwhile collection on a shoestring budget through creative collaboration.

The information landscape is rapidly shifting, from print to electronic and from still text to immersive media. Libraries must employ adaptive strategies to navigate this new terrain, not merely resisting the seismic shift, but reinventing our collections. As we move into a digital landscape, art and design students still yearn for the tactile and material experiences that libraries offer. Compounding this challenge is the era of scarcity in which we find ourselves. As art librarians, we can reframe our thinking—not by seeking new resources, but by exploring what we might do with what we already have. What can we reuse or reimagine to stimulate renewed enthusiasm for research and learning?

Art librarians can embrace change by reconsidering how our collections relate to the past, present, and future. This panel centers on four case studies that highlight these time frames followed by a moderated discussion about the application of this sustainability mindset to the broader field of information work.

In REviving Discards, we learn about a library undergoing a transition to a more digitally-focused resource, where print books are being replaced with ebooks, slide collections are being replaced with online repositories, and outdated periodicals are being discarded for digital options. These tangible resources have completed their library service, but what if we could give them a second life? The library has developed a new collection of visual resources where students can explore these retired assets and transform them into new creations.

With libraries shifting to electronic resources, REactivating Spaces becomes crucial. Empty shelving and now inactive areas provide places for students to engage with new opportunities. On the arts level of a university library, the vacated periodicals area was transformed into a student exhibition space. Blank walls in the makerspace were lined with material samples, and the defunct dumbwaiter offered the potential for small displays of miniature books.

In REarranging Collections, due to budget reductions a librarian has been unable to purchase new print publications for her art and architecture library. Rather than let the stacks become stagnant, she is rearranging the current collection to create new curated browsing opportunities. Some collections are permanent, such as crafting a graphic novel collection, while others are temporary displays that expose connections between subjects and titles, such as highlighting books on architecture from the arts section.

Yet, what is absent from a collection can tell us as much as what is present. If what our collections contain is indicative of what society values, then absence reveals what society has found unimportant or, worse, chosen to suppress. REclaiming Lost Narratives examines how a librarian worked with a Women in Architecture and Design class to reclaim lost narratives of female designers by creating an exhibition of book covers, based on library research, dedicated to the monographs that should have been and could potentially be in the future.

By adopting a sustainability mindset, we resist the potential decline of libraries due to budget cuts and online convenience and reimagine what is possible with the resources at hand.

The work of archivists is often performed in parallel to librarians. Although the approach to managing an archival collection is different from managing a library collection, many of the same issues are raised in both fields. Attendees to this session will hear about current issues and topics within archives.

Establishing the NYC Trans Archives: Archival resistance in action
Speaker: Elvis Bakaitis (they/them)

NYC Trans archives is a newly founded, community-based archives located in New York City. We collect personal papers, art, digital media, zines, comics, and other forms of self-expressive works by and about transgender individuals and communities. This talk will provide a focused introduction to the start of an entirely new organization, based on a model of collective agreement/discussion, and operating on a limited, non-institutional budget. As a non-profit organization, NYC Trans Archives has been the recipient of two grants and will host an intern from the Mellon-funded FOCAS project in Fall 2026. The presenter will outline the NYC Trans Archives' origin story, a form of "resistance" in a time of systemic hostility to gender diverse lives in the United States. The purpose of this talk is to inspire connection at ARLIS between professionals in the field and the shared project of preserving histories of gender diverse people across the world.

滋賀重列: A case study of mutual influences and the archival traces they leave behind
Speaker: Emilee Mathews

In this paper I discuss archival traces across Japan and the United States regarding 滋賀重列|SHIGA Shigetsura, a Japanese architect who studied at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the 19th century and went on to develop the leading theory on late Meiji period Japanese housing typology. Perhaps most poignantly, only one building remains of SHIGA-san’s work: his own family home, which is still occupied by his descendents. That he was known for his expertise on housing and his own home still stands today is a testament to his understanding of the building typology. His own theory, one more defined by relativism than absolutist dictates, builds in flexibility and empathy to the individual circumstances of home ownership. SHIGA-san’s considerable body of writing and association with multiple institutions and publications left traces across both the University of Illinois archives and historic collections, and several repositories in Japan. It is a case study that illuminates links between Japan and the U.S. that are often acknowledged, yet our understanding of those influences still has much to improve. By telling this story through the lens of archival research, we can illuminate mutual dependencies between libraries across nations to tell expansive stories and celebrate cross-cultural accomplishments.

There’s Tea on the Table: end of life and legacy work in archival donor relations (or what I wish I had known before talking about death at work)
Speaker: Lucy Pauker

This paper addresses the challenges and offers potential aids to navigating trauma and grief in donor relations, from the perspective of an early career archivist. It explores these themes through the author’s role as Processing Archivist at a community archive (Jewish Public Library Archives) and leans specifically on the author’s relationship with a Montreal artist whose fonds is housed at the JPL-A. The presentation aims to dive into the trust building and difficult conversations that occur when pursuing legacy collections in which the donor is also the creator. By exploring examples of conversations with donors who are approaching end of life, or the families/colleagues of the recently departed, the author hopes to outline both the messiness of grief in the workplace and supports needed to aid in this process.

The NeverEnding Story: Current and Ongoing Issues in Architecture Archives
Speaker: Tellina Liu

This paper addresses three issues in architectural archives: increasing access and use, backlog and accruals, and donor relations.

In French we say, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," meaning "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Some of the changes we have experienced in the field of librarianship are here to stay, but some are not. From generative AI to library closures and job changes, change is all around us.

The Roots of This Tree Are Rotten!: Resisting the Institutional Push for GenAI
Speakers: Torie Quiñonez

The rapid rise of AI integration into our lives this past year has been startling. At all levels of the academy, educational organizations are announcing partnerships with tech companies seemingly without any critical consultation, thoughtful deliberation, or educator input. These expensive alliances are coming at a time of extreme budgetary contraction. Why are universities investing massive amounts in contracts with private companies when budgets are so tight? Who benefits? The call of “Will our students be ‘AI’ ready?” drowns out the more important question: “is AI ready for our students?” Research shows that Gen AI tools are often “confidently wrong,” offer up biased and racist responses, extract a devastating toll on the environment, provide venues for bad actors to exploit vulnerabilities, and harm critical thinking and analytical skills through repeated use and reliance.
While some educators talk about “ethical use of AI,” we argue that there is no ethical use possible when looking at all parameters. Even before addressing the resultant systemic issues, the tools themselves were created using stolen content and are currently being argued over in 47 legal cases (and counting). Our student artists and writers are in the crosshairs of these ethical issues. AI “helpers” have been inserted into many products without a stated desire or demonstrated need for them. The use cases we are given to convince us to uncritically adopt tools we never asked for are at best offering moderate levels of time-saving “efficiency,” and at worst replacing opportunities for actual care and communication with inferior electronic substitutes. Are they actually helping students learn? Or are they instead creating an added layer of obfuscation between a human and the information sources they need, while furthering disinvestment in education and people?
In the face of a forced narrative of tech inevitability, we want to give our university community another option: resistance. In the tradition of DIY resistance literature that came before us, we created a zine to provide a voice that goes against the stream of hype and normalization. In "The Roots of this Tree are Rotten!" we explain how we were inspired to look critically at the hype and call out GenAI, especially the way it has been an engine of shoddy substitutes for the things our students actually need: care, support, and mentorship. Instead of giving in to the convenient insistence that “it’s not going away,” we instead propose ways to resist, opt out, and push back on the narrative that “everyone is using it.” Attendees will learn about some of the major ethical concerns about Generative AI, how to identify and pop hype bubbles that push a narrative of tech inevitability, and ways to both resist uncritical adoption of GenAI tools and normalize opting out.

Final Chapters: How Academic Art Librarians Navigate Institutional Closure
Speaker: Becky Alexander

In the past decade, with increasing frequency, academic librarians at art colleges have arrived at work to learn that the libraries they have stewarded for years—sometimes decades—are closing along with their institutions. This is an unprecedented professional experience for which few librarians have experience or training. What does it mean to do the work of permanently closing a library under circumstances that are often confusing and emotionally fraught, and for which there are no clear or “right” answers?

This talk presents research by Becky Alexander, a librarian at the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute and currently an archivist at the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive. Drawing on interviews with ten other academic art librarians who experienced institutional closure, she examines how librarians navigated the dismantling of collections, the preservation of archives, the support of students and faculty, and the personal and professional ramifications of losing both a workplace and a community. By foregrounding librarians’ lived experiences, this presentation shares lessons learned, ethical considerations, and forms of solidarity that can help guide others facing similar institutional crises.

Lineages of Solo Librarianship at the Center for Book Arts
Speakers: Gillian Lee, Nicole Rosengurt

In this talk, the former and current librarian at a small educational arts nonprofit discuss the challenges and successes of the transfer of responsibilities, and the real do’s and don’ts of leaving and beginning a “lone arranger” position.

We also dive deeper into the human connection and the professional lineage inherent to becoming a predecessor or a replacement. What relational and institutional considerations does one make when leaving a job? What relationship can grow between the “old” librarian and the “new” librarian? How can this relationship be grounds for fertile connection on a small scale that then blooms outward?

This talk also explores the ways in which the two librarians employ a collection of artists’ books and zines to be a powerful stage for resistance. Examples include: (re-)introducing students to physical/analog printing and binding technologies through artists’ books; small space and lone-arranger status allowing changes to curricula; teaching self-publishing to encourage self-expression; and making curatorial choices regarding accessioning new works.

How can librarians support and commemorate student-led protests? This timely topic will be considered in the context of recent protests and encampments, while keeping in mind lessons learned from protests dating back to the 1970s.

Vociférer par l’image : les affiches du Printemps érable
Speakers : Catherine Ratelle-Montemiglio, Catherine Bernier

En droite ligne avec la thématique du congrès ARLIS/NA 2026, soit la résistance, cette présentation aura pour objectif de présenter deux corpus d’affiches créés durant le mouvement étudiant de 2012. Surnommé le « Printemps érable », ce mouvement étudiant s’est formé d’abord pour lutter contre la hausse des droits de scolarité, pour par la suite embrasser des préoccupations sociétales plus larges. Les affiches sélectionnées pour cette présentation sont celles créées par le collectif de l’École de la Montagne rouge ainsi que par l’artiste Clément de Gaulejac. Ces corpus sont conservés par une institution patrimoniale, au sein d’une collection d’affiches regroupant plusieurs milliers de documents. Nous aborderons les enjeux d’acquisition et de conservation liés à ces documents éphémères. Nous présenterons également le corpus du point de vue du graphisme et de leur condition de création, soit dans l’urgence d’un mouvement politique. Nous souhaitons également aborder des sujets plus larges, comme la place des documents politiques et militants dans les collections institutionnelles.

Archiving Potential History: Pop-up Art Libraries and the 2024 Student Protest Encampments
Speaker: Maggie McLaughlin

This presentation uses the 2024 student protest encampments for Palestine liberation as a lens to activate the art library’s potential for resistance, social justice work, and student activism. In particular, this presentation concerns one specific encampment at a large public university and its combination art tent, zine collection, and pop-up library that sat at the center of the camp. This triangulation established the space as one of creativity, critical inquiry, and mutual aid, leading to a series of interdisciplinary teach-ins with collaborations between teaching faculty and university librarians. Rooted in this case study, this presentation considers the generative entanglement between art libraries, student activism, and information literacy. This presentation views art libraries as sites full of possibility and potential to document and archive a history of diversity and dissent. It offers activating the art library as a space of messiness and movement, bringing together the study and practice of art in ways that help students assess their own critical and ethical engagement with the contemporary information landscape, especially as relates to social justice.

Art Students’ Resistance: Studying the Past, Informing the Future
Speaker: Rachel Resnik

In 1970 students across the United States held protests to oppose the Vietnam War. On May 4th at Kent State University four students were killed and nine others were injured during one such protest. Twenty-eight National Guard troops had fired 67 rounds of bullets at the protesting students.

Already involved in the anti-war movement and enraged by the killings at Kent State, Massachusetts College of Art (MassArt) joined a national student strike. Classes were canceled and faculty and students engaged in community service projects. The most enduring project, The Graphic Workshop, operated from 1970-1992. Over its two decades in operation, the Workshop produced hundreds of silk-screened posters with styles and subjects reflecting the group’s changing priorities. The MassArt Archive holds many examples of Graphic Workshop posters; 162 examples are now available in the JStor Image Library.

The similarities between the state of affairs in 1970 and those today are striking. How can the work created in the early Seventies by the Graphic Workshop inform our interactions with students today? How can these posters inspire us to use our fear and frustration to make works of resistance that are meaningful, beautiful, and enduring?

Libraries curate and host exhibitions for a range of contexts and purposes, and exhibitions are a popular means of public scholarship and outreach. For many library workers, however, these responsibilities are often secondary to their primary duties or job functions, requiring additional labor and frequently with limited or no formal training. This panel will explore how four different librarians, representing museum, academic, and art spaces, began working on exhibition projects and learned curatorial practices. Additionally, the panel will discuss how curatorial projects fit into their standard library work and broader library goals.

Curation and exhibition design are intersecting skills that draw from a variety of disciplines to advance information literacy, visual storytelling, and pedagogical practice in physical and digital spaces. In these spaces, library workers serve in multiple roles, including student mentors, visual educators, creative designers, and program managers. By translating our expertise and talents into exhibitions, we can create transformative experiences for our communities, whether through works of art or library resources. This viewpoint, which highlights creativity, authorship, and collaboration, serves as an act of resistance against the framing of librarians as customer service drones. More than a display of objects, exhibition work provides an important avenue of expression, scholarship, and creative growth.

A Library Exhibition Program for Everyone: Coordinating Both Library- and Community-Led Exhibits
Speaker: Heather Koopmans

What does one need to lead an exhibits program that includes library-initiated exhibits as well as those developed by members of an academic community? Heather Koopmans will share how she learned on-the-job to review and select exhibits as part of a program, co-plan exhibits with faculty and library peers (bridging departments and disciplines), showcase faculty- and student-generated art in the library, and evolve the program in alignment with changing priorities.

Back to School: Library Lessons in Museum Studies
Speaker: Jacob Lackner

How do museum studies and librarianship intersect in the world of exhibitions? Jacob Lackner will discuss leading a museum and exhibitions team, curating exhibits alongside students and faculty, and the experience of learning as a student in a museum studies MA program.

The Art of Museum Library Exhibitions: Combining Diverse Skills to Foster Creative Curation
Speaker: Rebekah S. Boulton

Rebekah Boulton is a museum librarian working in a public-facing reading room, and curates exhibitions of library materials within the museum’s exhibitions program and hosts related public programming. Like many librarians, Boulton came to this work with no formal exhibitions training, and draws from her background in art history and library studies to consider all aspects of curation to be able to convey the meaning and merit of materials to audiences.

Learning on Display: Curatorial Praxis in an Academic Art Library
Speaker: Courtney Hunt

Speaking from experiences at a public R1 university, Courtney Hunt will share how she learned to curate through the staging of a semester-long exhibition containing library and special collections materials as well as art. Hunt will also speak about running an exhibitions program of student/staff work in a standalone fine arts library.

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.

Art libraries within academic institutions and museums globally continue to play a vital role in advancing the work of decolonization and Indigenization across library spaces, collections, and information cataloguing practices. This session highlights initiatives that contribute meaningfully to the ongoing journey toward reconciliation, with case studies spanning Canada and Norway. Presentations will examine the Indigenous art purchasing program at the University of Manitoba, including the work of an artist whose pieces are now prominently featured within the library; the Salish Weave Teaching Collection integrated into the Indigenous Curriculum Resource Centre at Simon Fraser University Library in Burnaby; and the decolonizing strategies undertaken by librarians at the Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum) in Oslo. Together, these projects reflect a growing commitment to inclusive, culturally responsive library practices and the reimagining of institutional relationships with Indigenous knowledge systems.Art as Literacy: bringing Indigenous art into academic libraries
Speaker: Ashley Edwards

Indigenizing the University of Manitoba Libraries' Art Collection
Speaker: Janet Rothney

Indigenous art in Norwegian libraries: DDC and Humord after the launch of the report Truth and Reconciliation – basis for a settlement with Norwegianization Policy and Injustice against Sami, Kven/Norwegian Finns and Forest Finns
Speakers: Hildegunn Gullåsen, Birgit Jordan, Per Gisle Galåen

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.

In an era marked by ongoing budget cuts, shrinking storage space, and a surge in born-digital records creation, archives face a growing challenge: How do we determine what to keep? Focusing specifically on artists’ archives, this panel discussion will convene experienced archival professionals working across museums, academic libraries, and artist foundations, in both Canada and the USA to explore the complex strategies and evolving criteria involved in appraisal and collection development.

The panel will address the increasing necessity for appraisal, weeding, and sampling under institutional pressures, and how decisions must balance institutional priorities with the inherent richness and messiness of preserving an artistic practice. Artists’ archives—often composed of highly personal, eclectic, and unconventional materials—do not always fit neatly into traditional institutional frameworks. As such, appraisal requires deep contextual knowledge and collaborative engagement with artists and their estates, and a willingness to advocate for nuance in what might otherwise be seen as ephemeral material.

Panelists will bring their specialized experience, highlighting approaches to appraising both physical and born-digital materials. Particular attention will be given to handling accruals, which pose logistical and intellectual challenges as some artists continue to work and produce after the initial donation. These additions often fall outside of typical processing workflows and call for agile, iterative approaches to appraisal and processing.

The discussion will also explore ways that professionals are resisting increased limitations—budgetary, spatial, and administrative—to ensure that artists' archives continue to be collected and preserved equitably across institutions. How can we maintain commitments to underrepresented voices and experimental practices when resources are stretched thin? What ethical obligations do institutions have when facing these limitations?

Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution, this session will provide a space for reflection on best practices and peer exchange. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the tensions at play, implementable strategies, and the knowledge to advocate for thoughtful and sustainable appraisal practices.

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.

Working in a museum library combines aspects of academic, special and public librarianship. Speakers in this session will present on the unique issues facing museum libraries and librarians.

Forging a Library-Museum Partnership: Creativity, Exploration, and Resistance
Speaker: Jacob Lackner

After the Oxford College Library and the Michael C. Carlos Museum were brought together as part of organizational realignment at Emory University, library and museum staff began to build a formalized partnership for the first time. The goal of this endeavor was to bring museum collections, resources, and personnel to a new audience at a new campus. Collaboration started with small meetings and building internal teams with relevant stakeholders. This created a foundation for lending artwork, planning and constructing a dedicated exhibition space, and guest speaking during library instruction. The process has required a commitment to cooperation, resource sharing, flexibility, and patience, but has already achieved exciting results. Museum resources enabled the library to bring more diverse voices onto the Oxford College campus, including works by contemporary African and contemporary Indigenous artists, as well as displaying an exhibit of works on paper that was co-curated with an Oxford College faculty member.

As an act of resistance, this collaboration stands against the dominant view that undergraduate education should prioritize job training and narrow pathways over humanistic inquiry and digressions into the arts. Instead, this project encourages students to resist the pressure of productivity, look at something unexpected in the library, and ask questions about the relationship between art, information, and society. Additionally, the project resists the idea that museum collections must always remain in the museum, giving them new context and new viewers in a new place. Established pieces from the collection can be reinterpreted by taking up residence amidst busy students, student artwork, and book stacks.

Attendees will learn strategies and takeaways for planning library-museum collaboration and be encouraged to see how similar partnerships can advance long-term goals at their institutions. Libraries and museums can learn much from each other, and joining forces can leave both institutions better prepared for the challenges of the future.

Catalogues of the World: Building a Universal Archive
Speaker: Holly Phillips

Launched in 2001, the Contemporary Catalogs Project (CCP) is an initiative of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library to actively collect and preserve contemporary art gallery exhibition catalogs from around the world. Led by library staff with support from interns and volunteers, the project entails identifying galleries, requesting catalogs, recording solicitations, and acknowledging donors. The project goals are: to preserve publications for future researchers; acquire materials while they are still readily available; represent living artists as inclusively and globally as possible; and expand collecting beyond dominant networks of publishers and distributors.

Through sustained outreach and the generosity of galleries worldwide, the library has acquired more than 25,000 publications, representing 60 countries and over 10 languages. In 2020, the project was expanded to include PDF catalogs, which Watson is requesting, archiving, and making publicly available for online viewing and download. More than 5,700 gallery catalog PDFs are now available directly through WorldCat, Watsonline (our online catalog), and downloadable as an entire collection in MARC format record sets.

This presentation will include an overview of the workflow and tracking documentation developed for the project, highlights and key takeaways, and introduce a newly launched landing page and online index.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Korea
Speaker: J. Vera Lee

This original archival research focuses on the role of the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA; formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts (HAA)) in a seminal stateside exhibition of Korean National Treasures. Robert Griffing, then-Director of HAA, became interested in sponsoring an exhibition of Korean National Treasures as a member of the UNESCO-International Commission of Museums (ICOM; 1947). When the Korean War erupted in 1951, and national treasures in peril were packed and moved from the National Museum of Korea (NMK) in Seoul to Pusan, Griffing offered HAA as a haven for Korean National Treasures to Kim Chewon, NMK Director. Griffing and Kim’s correspondence reveals a framework of influence and power linked to narrating national identity through the objects of the eventual 1957 exhibition (that originated with the National Gallery of Art). I evaluate the making of this exhibition as a precursor to current events around national representation in art museums and libraries. On a more modest scale, I have reformatted my position and labor as a museum librarian to include research and writing. Altogether, I read power and roles that undergird either exhibitions or workflows through a Critical Librarianship lens, to highlight opportunities for resistance, whether geo-political, organizational, or narrative.

How can libraries, museums, and the vendors they partner with embody resistance in the face of privatization, censorship, and inequity? This panel will explore an emerging partnership between Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), an organization dedicated to preserving and providing access to media art, and Pratt Institute Libraries, which is working to expand ethical, sustainable access to these collections. Positioning themselves as allies rather than vendors, EAI is actively developing initiatives that resist barriers to access by highlighting marginalized art histories, supporting educators in underfunded schools, and collaborating with organizations such as Art Resources Transfer to distribute publications and curricula to public libraries and prison systems.

The panel will examine how libraries, artists, and cultural organizations can collaborate to resist exploitative market dynamics, expand access to underrepresented voices, and preserve media art as a vital cultural record. Rebecca Cleman, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), will outline EAI’s mission and history of providing educational access to media art, with a focus on the Educational Streaming Service and recent partnerships with academic institutions. Nelson Henricks, a Montreal-based educator and artist with media art in distribution through Video Data Bank, will discuss his experience using EAI in the classroom. Matthew Garklavs, the Electronic Resources Librarian at Pratt Institute Libraries, will address his collaboration with EAI to develop a shared cataloging infrastructure and reflect on working with vendors to support sustainable, long-term access to educational resources.

While touching upon current developments in the field, this panel will position collaborations between vendors, libraries, and creators not as transactional relationships but as opportunities for solidarity and shared purpose. In contrast to conventional subscription models, EAI is piloting new pathways, such as subsidized streaming for schools and open sharing of MARC records, that align with libraries’ commitments to openness and equitable access. By including an artist’s voice, the panel will also foreground the stakes for creators whose works risk invisibility without the stewardship of organizations committed to long-term preservation and accessibility.

Anchored in Montreal, a city with a deep history of cultural resistance, this panel will resonate with the conference theme by showing how art information professionals can transform professional practice into a form of resistance, expanding access, amplifying marginalized histories, and reimagining collaborative partnerships over commerce.

Some librarians are turning to arts and crafts as a way to engage new and continuing audiences. Presenters in this session will discuss how using crafting in the library has provided new opportunities for their researchers.

Craftivism as Library Pedagogy in the Age of Disruption
Speakers: Kellie Lanham-Friedman, Rachel Riter

Craftivism, simply put, is craft + activism. In this paper, we present an overview of what craftivism is, the movement’s significance to the current socio-political climate, and how we have embedded a maker pedagogy into library instruction sessions and workshops. Drawing on existing literature on maker pedagogy, the presentation outlines our institution’s incorporation of maker tools into curriculum (including zine assignments, podcast lessons, and more), and highlights a new workshop designed around craftivism titled Unraveled: Censorship and Craft. Participants learned basic sewing skills while creating embroidered patches, buttons, and bracelets with messages that resonate with their sociopolitical beliefs. Alongside skill-building, participants were introduced to the concept of craftivism and invited to connect it with issues like free speech, censorship, and intellectual freedom. Ultimately, craftivism and maker pedagogy gives students a voice to defend their rights, expands their autonomy, and challenges flawed traditional forms of educational assessment. This paper situates craftivism not only as a creative practice, but also as a pedagogical strategy for academic libraries to resist cultural and technological disruption while empowering students to think critically, create meaningfully, and advocate for their rights.

Cut, Paste, & Share: 20 Creative Ways to Teach with Zines and Spark Low Cost High-Impact Engagement in Libraries
Speaker: Megan Lotts

Zines—self-published, low-cost, and highly creative—are transforming how libraries engage with their communities. Since launching the Rutgers Art Library Zine Initiative in 2019, we have seen firsthand how zines foster creativity, visual literacy skills, self-expression, and storytelling while empowering underrepresented communities.

This presentation will share 20 practical tips for integrating zines into library programming, collections, and instruction. Drawing on examples from the Art Library Zine Teaching Collection—which now includes over 750 unique resources—this presentation will highlight strategies for using zines in classrooms, and for events, and outreach activities. Case studies include collaborations with an English Department to transform annotated bibliography assignments into zines, a partnership with an Asian American Studies Department that won a digital humanities award, and the creation of popular library “Zine Creativity Kits” distributed to over 500 patrons during Welcome Week events.

From this presentation participants will learn how zines can support interdisciplinary teaching, empower underrepresented voices, and create opportunities for playful, hands-on learning in library settings. The session will also discuss practical considerations such as curating a zine collection, facilitating workshops, promoting engagement through exhibits and how to engage cross-disciplinary and organizational collaborations. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for starting or expanding zine initiatives in their own libraries—whether through instruction, outreach, or collection development—all while keeping costs low and impact high.

Archival Interventions (with Scissors!): Zine- and Buttonmaking as Resistance at UCSC Special Collections and Archives
Speaker: Sam Regal

As is intrinsic to most repositories, the collections within the University Archives at UC Santa Cruz are interwoven with bias. Collections materials unevenly represent student life and experience, eliding certain knowledge, identities, and expression across the documented history of the university. In response and resistance to these elisions, UCSC Special Collections and Archives developed the “Zine Art Party,” a critical zine- and buttonmaking series hosted in Special Collections and Archives. At these events–usually held during finals week–students are invited to cut, remix, collage, and otherwise intervene upon the archive to tell their own stories. The “Zine Art Party"" has three major objectives: to welcome students into Special Collections and Archives and foster a sense of belonging in the space, to critically activate collections materials, and to empower students to pursue arts-based research methodologies. Librarian Sam Regal will set the “Zine Art Party” program in situ by outlining the role, utility, and activist potentialities of critical making as a teaching methodology and research practice, with particular attention paid to the political implications of experimentation and play.

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. 
#madeinquebec

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.

Returning for its twentieth year, New Voices in the Profession provides professionals who are new to art librarianship or visual resources work the opportunity to present topics from exceptional coursework, such as a master's thesis, or topics with which they are engaged early in their professional life. New professionals are defined as either students in MLIS or Master's programs leading to a career in art librarianship or visual resources, or those within five years of Master's level study. For many, this is their first professional speaking engagement.

This panel began at the ARLIS/NA 2006 Annual Conference in Banff and has since received wide attention and praise. Topics presented reveal new ideas as well as different ways of thinking about established concepts. Speakers give the conference attendees a glimpse of academic interests and current discourses of the newest ARLIS/NA members.

The New Voices session is organized by the Professional Development Committee, ArLiSNAP, and the Student Advancement Awards Subcommittee.

Dusting Off the Artist Files: Early Career Collaborations in Art Librarianship, Cataloguing and Archives
Speaker: Kate Nugent
From 1969 to 2014, the librarians at the Bibliothèque des arts de l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) collected ephemera that documented the activities of Canadian artists, galleries and exhibitions in the form of artist files. Until recently, these files—which predominantly relate to Québécois artists and local Montreal galleries—were not discoverable in the library catalogue, and were thus rarely consulted by students. To evaluate the significance of the artist files and the feasibility of integrating them into the library catalogue, a student was recruited as part of an internship in an MLIS program. Following her recommendations, the cataloguing team at UQAM decided to prioritise the artist files and began processing the collection to make it discoverable and accessible to students.
This presentation will outline my experience as an early-career cataloguing librarian processing artist files, an experience that builds on my previous archival work and my background in art history. I will discuss the challenges of the project, how I combined cataloguing and archival standards, and the experience of working with a student as an early professional. This presentation ultimately advocates for collaboration in these projects—between departments, between students and librarians—and encourages new professionals to take on these projects as a way to learn and grow.

Mexican Bracero Railroaders in the United States During World War II: An Endangered History
Speaker: Emily Mizokami, Gerd Muehsam Award 2026
More than 136,000 Mexican citizens came to the United States during World War II to work the most grueling railroad jobs through a contractual agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. At the war's end, they were all immediately and unceremoniously sent back to Mexico. And yet, few have heard their stories. The railroaders were part of the larger bracero program which primarily employed farm workers. The railroad arm of the program lasted only two and half years, while the agricultural branch went on for 22 years. The short duration of the program, combined with the difficulty of accessing archival records documenting living and working conditions, explains the lack of a robust selection of comprehensive literature and public awareness about World War II bracero railroaders. If the bracero program is featured in scholarly journals, it is rare for the railroad braceros to be provided more than a passing mention. If one walks through the exhibit spaces in North America's premiere railroad museums, one will not see these men represented in photographs, documents, or railroad art. To raise awareness and encourage further research, this presentation provides a brief history of the railroad bracero program, a review of existing literature on the understudied topic, and thoughts as to why we still know so little about these men and their contributions.

The Role of Fellowships in Early Career Development
Speaker: De’Ivyion “Ivy” Drew
What is the role of library fellowships in early-career development? This presentation will cover the fellowship experiences of the UNC Chapel Hill Primary Source Teaching Fellowship and the Yale Kress Fellowship in Art Librarianship. MLIS students gain expertise of daily library activities through work practicums in settings that interest them; however, these practicums lack the ability to expose students to a wide variety of librarianship paths, often limited to the setting/context of the hosting institution. Both fellowships feature self-directed project deliverables and collaborative structures designed to address the gap MLIS students experience navigating the paths of librarianship.
The Primary Sources Teaching Fellowship is funded by a three-year (2022 to 2025) grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program and has library alumni that have made significant contributions to public institutions, private institutions, and cultural heritage institutions. In comparison, for almost 30 years, the Kress Foundation, Yale University Libraries, and the Yale Center for British Art together have supported a fellowship for new library school graduates to engage in an immersive one-year experience in art librarianship. Kress Fellows who are selected and complete a capstone project continue their library career on an impressive trajectory, eventually becoming University Librarians, Directors of Fine Art and Architecture Libraries, and other major leadership positions.
Fellowship experience develops library confidence, expands library connections through networking, and can clarify which library roles align best, therefore significantly impacting an early-career librarian for their entire path in librarianship.

Breaking into Cataloging: Learning, Adapting, and Succeeding
Speaker: Madeline (Maddie) Hayko (she/her)
Cataloging, a field that many young professionals are interested in, yet most receive little to no training before being thrown headfirst into a professional cataloging position. Once in a new position, where does one turn for resources, support, and how does one gain confidence in cataloging? In my presentation “Breaking into Cataloging: Learning, Adapting, and Succeeding” I discuss my background in cataloging before accepting a full-time position, reflect on my first year as a cataloger, and what I learned to be initially successful. I will share resources and connections that help me gain confidence in my cataloging abilities and how I adapt while learning the standards of the trade. Lastly, I convey how a new professional can feel successful in cataloging even with little to no prior experience or guidance. This presentation is for those interested in cataloging, new catalogers, and for professionals experiencing imposter syndrome in a very technical field.

#madeinquebec

What's new in academic librarianship? Join us for four papers from colleagues from the US and Canada as they present on new projects, workflows, and policies.

“But what is it doing here?”: Library exhibition as pedagogy, strategy, and belonging
Speakers: Sarah Ward, Madeline Eschenburg

In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, Butler University’s Irwin Library mounted an exhibition to highlight how previous generations used art to process grief and loss, build community, and fight for their lives. The goal: to combine display, pedagogy, and outreach by involving students, faculty, and the broader Indianapolis community in a month-long, multi-modal, collaborative exhibit.

Unexpectedly, the exhibit also provided visible, concrete support to marginalized members of the community during a time when DEI-labeled programs were shuttering across the country. As one student asked on the eve of the opening, “Is that a real González-Torres? But what is it doing here?” The answer: it is here because you are here, and you should see yourself and your interests reflected here.

This presentation offers a case study that provides creative examples of connecting librarians (and libraries) with students, faculty, and administration. It will examine ways that existing ARLIS resources can contribute to successfully mounting an exhibition on a shoestring budget. It will also present the perspectives of the co-curators, an arts librarian and an art history professor, to discuss their approach in engaging the library as a space of learning, engagement, and belonging.

Who’s an Authority, Anyway? DEIA-AR-centered Instruction on Finding and Evaluating Sources
Speaker: Jean Thrift

This case study presents a librarian-art history faculty collaboration at Furman University in spring of 2025, on instruction exploring two frames of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education through a DEIA-AR lens. These lessons were part of a writing-research intensive course examining the role of museum spaces as sites for activism and resistance in contemporary society. Students conducted research projects culminating in proposals for DEIA-AR initiatives to be implemented in contemporary museums. For the frame ‘Information Has Value,’ we assigned a short reading and screened part of a documentary to inform a class discussion on equity issues in the scholarly communication landscape. Students then reviewed strategies for finding and accessing sources with a deeper understanding of why some sources are open access, while some must be accessed through the library, and the implications of each model. Next, for the frame ‘Authority Is Constructed and Contextual,’ we interrogated who is considered an authority by presenting and discussing scholarly communication demographic data. Students then evaluated and discussed, with a critical focus on bias, the authority of two potential sources they had found.

Breaking the Virtual Ceiling: Library Strategies for VR/AR Adoption in Design Disciplines
Speaker: Alisha D. Rall

As information professionals, we have all experienced the frustration when an emergent technology fails to meet expectations, encounters complex barriers or lacks equitable access. While the widespread adoption of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) in higher education has fallen short of expectations, the potential value in the architecture and design environment are compelling. Pedagogical benefits of immersive 3D visualization include increased student engagement, improved spatial perception, dynamic precedent research, and high impact design problem solving. As architecture and design librarians, it is important to understand how we might assist our liaison faculty in overcoming hurdles to bringing the VR/AR experience into the classroom.

Our academic library is the home of a large makerspace/innovation lab. Upon the recent acquisition of forty Meta Quest 3 headsets, the team was looking for campus partners to promote VR technology usage beyond gaming and entertainment. With the mission to embed VR experiences into academic curriculum, a pilot test was launched between the library and the College of Architecture, Planning and Design to test feasibility of VR headset applications in the classroom. This initiative explored the feasibility of headset lending program for classroom assignments from technical, pedagogical and service model perspectives.

My presentation will share the progress of our pilot test, highlighting challenges and opportunities of VR/AR adoption in academic environment, particularly within the arts, humanities and design disciplines. Drawing on practices at peer institutions, the discussion will address service models, patron privacy, technological obsolescence, app hosting and uploads, accessibility, and curriculum integration. A persistent limitation of VR adoption in higher education is the difficulty of connecting headset use to instructional content; too often, VR/AR in academic libraries remains confined to gaming rather than deeper immersive learning.

The intended outcome of the pilot project is to develop a VR/AR Curriculum Starter Kit to help faculty embed immersive technology into coursework. While the initial project focused on architecture, the potential applications for the arts, humanities and design curriculum is equally significant. Given the importance of visual and spatial experience in these disciplines, they are ideally positioned to benefit from immersive VR/AR learning.

Reinvigorating Library Policies with EDI, Sustainability, and Accessibility Frameworks
Speaker: D. Vanessa Kam

With the goal of revising library policies to better align with valued principles of EDI, sustainability, and accessibility, this presentation will describe a process for evaluating and reinvigorating library policies through the use of relevant frameworks. After conducting research and consulting with experts in the field, a library committee identified four established frameworks for this work. This presentation will describe the methods of the committee's deliberations, the challenges of working with a variety of frameworks (some of which were abstract in nature), the degree to which library policies were revised as a result, and what was learned by walking through the process. The presenter will conclude with comments about how to take this work to the next level while trying to avoid the trap of ""nonperformativity,"" as described by Sara Ahmed, where the act of writing policy is a stand-in for meaningful action.

Don't have a lot of time? Join us for some "p'tite vite" (lightning talks) covering a variety of topics in art librarianship.

Errand into the Maze: Untangling Photograph Vertical File Cataloguing Practices
Speakers: Sarah Fischer, Angela Rapp

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division photograph vertical files are among the most utilized of our collections. As dance is an ephemeral art form, these photographs are often some of the only visual documentation of choreographic works. Maintaining artificial collections at institutions as vast as the New York Public Library provides its own challenges and we questioned if our vertical files were truly available for “ready reference” in our reading room. In the fall of 2024, we began to actively remediate stub catalog records for our photograph files to improve their searchability and create more access points.

We will discuss our ongoing process to update all stub records from preexisting formats to RDA standard, as well as increase authorized authority files and local subject headings listed. This work will allow patrons to gain a stronger, more comprehensive understanding of what they will receive in our reading room. In addition, these controlled access points increase the visibility of underrepresented dance artists and companies. This project could also serve as a future model for remediation of other vertical files in our collections and for similar institutions that prioritize accessibility and service.

DIY Scholarship: Zines in Academic Libraries
Speaker: Autumn Wetli-Staneluis

Zines are gaining visibility on college campuses through both teaching and creation, and in academic libraries as part of archives or circulating collections. Zines are often archived as ephemera reflecting specific times, places, and cultures, while others provide extracurricular support for students’ personal lives and, in teaching contexts, zines can serve as outlets for creative self-expression. This talk will focus on zines within a scholarly realm. It will begin by briefly defining the zine and how it often appears in academia and outline the development and purpose behind a new circulating zine collection at a large academic library. Key considerations for libraries developing similar collections will be provided. The main emphasis of this talk though, will be on how zines can function as a valuable supplement to traditional, academic scholarship. Zines contribute meaningful work that complements, yet exists outside of, traditional publishing avenues, offering unique insights and showcasing scholarship that challenges conventional publishing models. Zines can elevate marginalized voices, address controversial or complex issues, and add a personal dimension to scholarly output. They can serve as easily accessible resources, often written in plain language rather than academic jargon, that spark interest in a topic and may even inspire students to pursue their own scholarly work outside traditional publishing realms. This is particularly significant because standard scholarly publishing can exclude diverse contributions due to Eurocentric, historically imposed definitions of what constitutes “scholarly work.” The speaker will share several examples from their library’s zine collection that illustrate this role of the zine in scholarly research.

Self-Publishing as Resistance: The Role of Artist-Run Centres in Collecting Small Press Publishing
Speaker: Tess Davey

Art Metropole is a non-profit artist-run centre with a 51-year history of exhibiting, publishing, collecting, and distributing printed works by contemporary artists. Recently our organization has placed a growing emphasis on placing small-press and self-published titles in libraries and special collections. This endeavour expands on our founding incentive as an artist run-centre and collection agency devoted to the documentation, archiving and distribution of all the images, by emphasizing the power of cultivating library partnerships to increase the circulation of publications that are sourced directly from the artists who produce them. By distributing a large number of self-published and small press works, Art Metropole has historically been a channel for marginalized groups to distribute works by and for their communities. Our ever-expanding inventory of zines, artists’ books and multiples is a testimony to the relationship between artists’ publishing and underground networks of resistance and information sharing. A core tenet of our mandate is ensuring such works enter the historical record, so establishing direct relationships with artists and librarians through our Library Services Program and inventory channels is a key emphasis of our organization.

Shake Those Assets! Using Special Events to Promote Your Hidden Collections
Speaker: Nicole O’Hara

Academic libraries’ institutional archives can be one of the most underutilized resources on campus. Tucked away in locked rooms and filled with crumbling papers and yellowing photographs, they’re ubiquitous yet largely invisible. Their hidden nature and limited accessibility make it difficult to secure the funding and staffing needed for long-term care—especially at smaller institutions.

In this lightning talk, one librarian will share how the library used their institution’s bicentennial celebration to showcase and strengthen support for our archives. The biggest challenge faced: in 200 years, the university has never had a dedicated archivist. Archival policy-making, acquisitions, arrangement and preservation have always been handled piecemeal, as time and resources allowed.

By leveraging exhibitions, social media, cross-campus collaborations, and special events, the library put these collections in the spotlight. This visibility revealed their value not only for scholarship, but also for promoting the university and situating it within the broader community. As a result, administrators, board members, donors, alumni, and community partners are now engaged with the archives—and far more likely to champion their preservation.

Attendees at this talk will learn about how they can shine light on their hidden collections to gain support for long term archival management and care.

Art and design librarianship requires a balance of subject expertise, knowledge of unique and distinct collections, interdisciplinary research practices, and creative problem-solving. Often these professionals work in specialized libraries where they employ a wide range of library-related knowledge and skills. All of these qualities make art librarians uniquely situated for library leadership roles beyond their disciplinary knowledge. Yet the transition from subject specialist to library administrator is not often discussed, and the challenges and opportunities resulting from this progression remain underexplored. This panel brings together art librarians who now serve in administrative positions, sharing how their experience in art librarianship has shaped their approach to library leadership.
This session focuses on pathways to library administration, with the intention to demonstrate how art librarian expertise can translate effectively into a diverse range of administrative and leadership competencies. Panelists hold a variety of leadership positions, some maintaining their core art librarian duties while others are entirely focused on administrative responsibilities. They represent academic and art and design school libraries located in the United States and Canada, providing a diverse range of perspectives, and will speak to the conference theme of resistance to the many challenges facing the profession.

Some prompts and questions panelists may address include:
-How would you describe your career trajectory and how has your background in art librarianship prepared you for your current role as a library administrator?
-What professional and personal adjustments are necessary when moving from a subject specialist role to an administrative one, and have you been able to retain connections to your work as an art librarian while taking on broader responsibilities?
-Tapping into the spirit of resistance, how do you resist the challenges faced by librarians in this age, including but not limited to censorship, government interference, budget cuts, and the reduction of staff and resources?
-How can library administrators foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in their libraries?
-What advice do you have for art librarians who are interested in moving into administrative roles in an academic and/or art and design school setting and how can ARLIS/NA better support this career trajectory?

By centering the voices of art librarians who have successfully transitioned into administrative roles, this panel seeks to demystify the path from subject specialist to library leader. It will provide practical advice, inspiration, and a space for honest reflection on the challenges and rewards of such career moves. After all, leadership itself is an art—shaped by experience, creativity, and a commitment to both people and collections.

This panel is moderated by a member of the ARLIS/NA Management SIG.

This pre-coordinated panel, organized by the Museum Library Division, will feature speakers from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). Panelists will speak on experiences and preventive measures taken with various environmental crises, including fires, floods, and tornadoes. Utilizing a case study approach, panelists will draw on personal experiences with disasters and their impact on work practices. The theme of resistance will be explored in how staff prioritize collection care, access policies, and well-being during times of disasters in GLAM environments. Attendees will come away from this panel with resources on disaster preparedness to spark dialogue and action in the ARLIS/NA community.

Documenting Disaster: The Role of Technical Services and Archival Work in Times of Severe Weather
Speakers: Jenna Stout, Rebecca Brown-Gregory
This paper will explore the intersection of technical services and archival work in documenting past disasters and historic building vulnerabilities while also preparing for future disasters. In the wake of ongoing environmental events, including recent tornado activity, and infrastructure deterioration, it is more important than ever to have continuity of operations in place. Art museum library workers will speak on the significance of cataloging and making accessible past institutional reports on environmental risks. The paper will also dive into departmental efforts, ranging from the creation of disaster kits to the flagging of priority collections for first responders, and overall maintenance of institutional knowledge.

The Emotional Toll of Protecting Archival Memory in the Path of the Los Angeles Fires
Speaker: Lola Jalbert
I began an internship with the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library (housed in USC Special Collections) last January as the Los Angeles fires broke out. Part of the collection is housed at USC and was untouched by the fires, but other materials are stored in a house in the Pacific Palisades, where the fires began. I am interested in drawing on my personal experience, as well as the experiences of other involved parties, to argue that emotional resilience is as much a part of disaster preparedness as bureaucracy and logistics.

“A Plan, and Not Quite Enough Time”: My Journey Through Disaster Planning, Recovery, and Management for Audiovisual Archives
Speaker: Linda Smith
I have interned at two sites that experienced significant flooding and while almost no AV materials were significantly destroyed, some changes to the space/storage were made (while other changes could or have not be made); students from my program were also involved in flood recovery to an AV archive and I have spoken with the archives director about those efforts and the aftermath of the flood; I will be approaching this from a research/case study methodology, utilizing interviews with those directly involved to emphasize the need for greater attention to this issue and how different care can look for AV materials/collections.

Catalogers, catalog users, and database builders in any type of library may encounter issues in the creation of metadata and how it is manifest in the catalog or discovery system. Existing metadata may need to be revised as names change, new names are encountered, language about topics evolves, or to revise harmful terminology. Sharing metadata involves the use of standard rules and procedures and controlled vocabularies such as LCSH and the Getty Vocabularies. All of these matters are covered by documentation from such organizations as OCLC, LC, PCC, ALA, and Getty. Open discussion to share experiences or methods can be helpful as well as providing answers to specific problems. Small groups (or a group of the whole) will discuss particular areas of concern, such as classification, artists' books, special collections materials, exhibition catalogs, authority control and entity management, local information, or tools for managing sets of records. All attendees would be able to introduce issues or offer solutions.

Don't have a lot of time? Join us for some "p'tite vite" (lightning talks) covering a variety of topics in art librarianship.

Artworks as Records: Healing Archival Absences in a Disability Arts Collection through Community Partnership
Speakers: Noa Ryan, Maylyn Iglesias, Kailee Faber

The Organization was a nonprofit active in the New York City area from the late 1960s through the 2010s that provided arts workshops and studio space and resources to people with severe mental illness and/or developmental disability with a history of institutionalization. From the 1970s-2010s, the organization maintained what they referred to as an “archive” of artworks created by members in workshops hosted in mental healthcare institutions or as part of the studio program. The records are mostly artworks on paper created in a variety of mediums, from painting to drawing to collage.

In our presentation, we will provide a brief overview of the collection, grant project, and processing approach before centering our talk on the unique strengths and challenges associated with incorporating community voices in archival processing. We will discuss the research, outreach, and ethics components of working with materials from underrepresented artists in the disability arts community. We’ll also address the challenges related to tackling a large-scale grant project with limited resources. We will close by describing our future goals for building out this collection with oral histories, activating the material with programming, using the artworks as educational tools, and engaging in further community collaboration.

Mapping Post-War Artistic Networks with Semantic Technologies
Speaker: Calista Donohoe

Art librarianship often operates in spaces where information is fragmented, siloed, or restricted. In this context, resistance can take the form of experimentation to create more open, flexible, and interconnected systems of information. This lightning talk will present the Roma/New York, 1948–1964 pilot project, an experimental initiative that demonstrates how knowledge graphs can model complex art historical narratives and serve as a mode of resistance within art librarianship.

This lightning talk will reflect on the process of developing the pilot, from identifying entities in the Celant/Costantini text to modeling relationships with attention to time and place. It will also address challenges encountered in translating narrative accounts into structured data, including issues of granularity, ambiguity, and alignment with other vocabularies.

Most importantly, this presentation will reflect on the broader implications of linked data as a cultural commitment to resistance through openness, collaboration, and connection. By resisting the fragmentation and privatization of information, art librarians can use linked open data to reveal connections across collections, geographies, and histories. The Roma/New York pilot shows that even small-scale, experimental initiatives can model a future where knowledge is more connected, accessible, and resilient.

Overcoming Student Resistance through providing Reference Services through the Writing/Tutoring Center
Speaker: Martha Neth

Academic libraries need to reimagine reference services in response to shifting student needs and changing patterns of campus engagement. One promising model integrates reference support directly into the writing and tutoring center, bringing research assistance to where students already seek academic help. This approach reduces barriers to library use, embeds research skill development into existing support networks, and creates a seamless pathway between tutoring, writing support, and research guidance. Students who resist traditional reference services can be reached more directly. And conversely, students who resist tutoring services may be brought into the fold through reference work.

This lightning talk will share a case study of implementing reference services in a tutoring center environment, highlighting how cross-trained tutors can address both research and writing challenges in a single interaction. Attendees will learn strategies for staff training, workflow integration, and marketing to students. I will explain how this approach fosters collaboration between librarians and tutoring staff, creates more authentic research consultations, and increases students’ confidence in navigating information resources.

Resisting Loss in the Performing Arts: Preserving At-Risk Media
Speaker: Olivia Buck

This lightning talk examines a digital preservation initiative launched in Spring 2025 at the Juilliard School to safeguard more than thirty years of archival performance recordings originally captured on VHS. In partnership with a digitization vendor, the project preserves student and faculty performances alongside masterclasses led by internationally recognized artists. This project positions digital preservation methodologies as a means of resisting the material and structural realities that commonly threaten time-based performing arts media. Attendees will gain practical insight into how art information professionals can apply preservation and descriptive strategies to support access to fragile, ephemeral, and at-risk audiovisual materials.

Mapping Memory: The Digital Lifecycle of the Architectural Postcard
Speakers: Riley Mang, Nilda Sanchez-Rodriguez

This talk presents the digitization, preservation, and exhibition of the Frank Wayde Hall Postcard Collection, a unique archive of over 13,500 postcards documenting architecture and urban life from around the world, with a particular focus on New York City. Acquired by the Architecture Library at The City College of New York in 2016, the collection captures streetscapes, buildings, and skylines that no longer exist, offering rare insights into the evolution of urban environments and the lived experiences of city residents.

The project, led by the Chief Architecture Librarian, combined archival scholarship, technical digitization, and public exhibition to make these ephemeral materials accessible to researchers, students, and the public. In collaboration, the team addressed both curatorial and technical challenges, including metadata creation, digital stewardship using JSTOR and Omeka platforms, and the translation of a complex archival collection into an engaging online exhibit.

The talk will highlight the process of turning this large-scale archival collection into a research-ready and pedagogically valuable resource, emphasizing decision-making in digital curation, collaborative project management, and platform-specific strategies. Attendees will gain practical guidance for similar initiatives, as well as an understanding of the scholarly potential of visual ephemera for architecture, urban history, and cultural studies.

By integrating conceptual research leadership with hands-on technical execution, this presentation demonstrates how digitization projects can transform historical collections into accessible, impactful resources for both academic and public audiences.
 

Collective memory institutions have functioned as gatekeepers of Remenkeemi (Indigenous Egyptian) cultures and knowledges stolen and retold through colonizing tales and mythologies. Colonial institutions including libraries, archives, universities, and museums hold manuscripts and art in Metremenkeemi (language of the people of the Black Soil) written in several scripts (Hieroglyphic, Hieretic, Demotic, Coptic). Categorizing our Indigenous language and cultures as ‘ancient’ history violently erases the Niremenkeemi's centuries long fight to survive through art, oral histories, and familial practices. Indigenous languages and sacred artifacts held within colonial institutions are undervalued, severed, categorized as dead historical artifacts, and remain inaccessible for revitalization efforts.

The language revival process we embarked upon is a land-based practice reconnecting colonized and displaced north Africans with the lands and ancestors that made them. We share how language revival through varied art practices is a form of archiving that preserves our language as both a cultural praxis and acts of living. Further, our multigenerational engagement and outreach through language and art programming to build our living archive connects Niremenkeemi across generations strengthening our language revival process.

This pre-coordinated session includes three Niremenkeemi (Egyptian people) language revival journeyers who carry and intersect the skills of archiving, art-making, and scholarship to explore art and visual literacy as a simultaneously archiving and reviving tool for ancestral languages and the teachings woven within. We explore Metremenkeemi’s expressions and archives through art and share the collective journey we have embarked upon through ancestral language lessons, cultural revival, and at this time, art to propel us further into our language as a day-to-day praxis. Working against the dominance of gatekeeping and access, this panel shares examples of the various artworks, writings, and alternative publications being created by Niremenkeemi through our language revival arts project.

We also share the many ways colonial memory institutions gatekeep our ancestral scripts and sacred artifacts. Many are catalogued as ‘rare’ and remain imprisoned within inaccessible special collections. We reflect on the ways that digital platforms allow us to undo some of that gatekeeping. For example, the Living Keemi website and online video meeting platforms enabled us to participate in language lessons across time zones. Recording/archiving lessons by our language keeper allow sharing our language with artists needed for our language revival process. Simultaneously, we are navigating the precarity of digital preservation and planning around the colonizing tendencies of predatory technology. Our process requires an ethics of care as we introduce artists to the language, engage in art making, plan a hybrid art exhibit, and decolonize approaches for archiving and sharing language revival art.

Language revival is an indigenization process that resists erasure and initiates healing from colonial violence and trauma. Learning our ancestral language allows us to access our ancestral wisdoms and knowledges, for language holds the nuances and analogies that make meaning out of the world around us. At its core Indigenous language revival as an archival process decenters colonialism and white supremacy and advocates for social justice while opening portals towards new world making and healing.

About the moderator:
Erika DeFreitas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.