Library work structures intellectual worlds as library workers collect, organize, make accessible, and preserve materials for use. This work is not neutral. Libraries, like all institutions, are produced in and through systems marked by racism, patriarchy, and capitalist modes of production. Critical librarianship offers a framework for thinking about our work that asks how library structures came to be and what ideologies underpin them. Viewing librarianship through this frame allows us to imagine new and better worlds on our way to making them.

This paper explores differing notions and possibilities for non-compliance in UK HE librarianship. It considers the landscape of UK HE, different notions of non-compliance, and how they relate to questions of power and possibility, the individual and the collective. The author argues that in contrast to a ‘refusal of work’ definition, non-compliance can be considered softly and expansively, as everyday actions and critical reflections. In addition to collective organisation, these actions are reflected upon as vital for keeping optimism in radical, progressive change alive.

This article explores issues of developing individual and collective professional identities within art librarianship, with an emphasis on art librarians’ relationship to art and art-making. By having more honest conversations around what art does, what artists do and how they function in society, we can challenge deeply held assumptions about art librarianship; in particular, that our work is somehow removed from the political and social contexts in which we perform it. Through critical interventions within our profession we can develop a better understanding and definition of our relationship to art and artists in order to situate ourselves within current art practices. We can then build impactful relationships and social justice-oriented solidarity with creative practitioners and artists who are actively challenging structural oppression and promoting social justice through their work.

Privileging the aesthetic aspects of knowledge organization through a feminist historical lens may open possibilities for reimagining a library's space. This paper reveals the history of a relatively unknown figure in the history of knowledge organization. I will suggest that we might regard Pamphila, a miscellanist who lived in Greece during the 1st century, as a ‘radical cataloguer’ who introduced a method associated with weaving and embroidery. Her organizational method privileged beauty and pleasure, along with historical accuracy and usefulness.

A version of this paper was presented as a keynote speech for the annual conference of ARLIS UK & Ireland in July 2018. The author would like to thank the coordinators for their hospitality and feedback.

How to answer this question? I guess I began my career as a librarian at a party. Newly possessing what I already knew was a useless (in capitalist terms, at least) MA in Art History, I had moved to New York City to be closer to my family, and to stay up all night at MisShapes parties and eat pizza at dawn. I was working in marketing for Forbes Magazine, as you do when you're 24 and need to pay the bills and have no idea what you want to do with your life. It wasn't long after the financial collapse of 2008, when job prospects were very low, that a friend of a friend who had just finished library school at Pratt handed me a drink at a party and said, ‘you like writing and researching, if you don't want to be a teacher, why don't you become a librarian?’

The Library Examined was a workshop held in January 2018 at Senate House Library, University of London. The workshop was designed and facilitated by Heiba Lamara and Rose Nordin from OOMK and Hudda Khaireh from Thick/er Black Lines in discussion with Laurence Byrne and Leila Kassir, Research Librarians at Senate House Library. The Library Examined was aimed at non-library-card-holders with the ambition to help demystify library processes and spaces and to provide a forum for the discussion and critiquing of the organisation of knowledge within the library. This article describes in the first three sections the librarians’ view of the workshop and why it was initiated, before Heiba and Hudda outline their invitation and research, and the workshop itself.

A version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of ARLIS UK & Ireland held at the Architectural Association, London, in July 2018.

This article presents an insider view of engagement with critical librarianship in a higher education and arts library context. The gains from this engagement include a stronger voice in institutional dialogue and collaboration, and the development of exploratory practices in collection development and information literacy that are increasingly informed by critical perspectives.

Our experiences and examples of emerging practise highlight some of the complexities and ambiguities of critical librarianship, around novelty, compliance, institutionalisation, and the challenge of how we convert these theoretical insights into the power structures at play in libraries and archives into meaningful changes for the benefit of all of our students.

Ultimately the conclusion is that if we recognise these power structures, and the particular role of the library in knowledge production, consumption and validation, we must take critically informed action.

If I'm being honest I still feel as though I am a bit of an imposter in the world of art librarianship. I often feel as though I have a very conservative, corporate and conformist approach to librarianship within the art library environments in which I work. I also often feel naïve when it comes to discussing and affirming ‘what makes art librarianship different?’ Acknowledging such naivety, I will also openly admit that until last year I had not heard of ‘critical librarianship’ as a concept, let alone ‘critical (art) librarianship’, which is how I was introduced to it at a day-long conference held by colleagues from the University of the Arts London in 2018 at Chelsea College of Arts.