In my last years of teaching at the University of Leeds (2019-20), I invited all first-year Fine Art and Art History students to meet me in the circular Reading Room of University of Leeds Library. I felt that, for many students arriving at university, the space, form, function and use of a research, or even a reference, library might be inhibiting, alien at worst and certainly overwhelming. My aim was to get them inside, and to then explore the Library as an architectural-spatial text written with books ordered and spaced according to classification systems that already encode and pre-frame their fields of knowledge amidst other discrete fields. Moreover, my lectures to them would question the system of classifying art and its histories laid out for them in the library. I might indeed deeply challenge this ‘order of things’ (to quote Michel Foucault.)1

Collection development for the arts at large research universities presents certain issues that can be challenging for the librarians responsible. Some of these issues include: collaborating with other selectors, managing multiple library locations, preventing unnecessary duplication, acquiring non-traditional material, working with non-academic publishers, and varying circulation policies. In this article, the Librarian for the Fine Arts and the Head of the Institute of Fine Arts Library at New York University will discuss their experience navigating these challenges in the first two and a half years of their collaboration. The authors will present strategies for leveraging these challenges as opportunities and will share the benefits they have experienced from this effort.

Annelys Devet is the co-founder of Disarming Design from Palestine, a non-profit organization with a mission to contribute through design to international solidary and social justice surrounding the Palestinian cause. Although the organization performs as a design label that promotes Palestinian voices, it also functions as a network that collects and archives “the traces of exchange.” The organization opened a physical “relational library” when it was operated a facility, Hosh Jalsa, in the Old City of Birzeit. The space had to close due to Covid, but the organization and the (now digital) library have continued the overall mission. The organization's website can be found at www.disarmingdesign.com.