In his 1956 film, Tout la mémoire du monde (All the memory of the world), French director Alain Resnais turned the black and white documentary footage of an automated retrieval system at the Bibliothèque Nationale into an ominously noire work. The film depicts an enormous open space criss-crossed with a matrix of metal rails. A robotic unit moves through it with eerie precision, its mechanism stopping to pull a book in crude imitation of a human motion. The tone has more in common with that of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) than with any cheerful ‘Let's go to the library’ educational pitch. After all, this is a library into which no one can go. A fully machinic world, its combination of nineteenth-century technology and twentieth-century managerial aspirations eliminates human presence as part of its pre-steam-punk dystopianism.

From the moment Gutenberg's Bible was set to print, books have played a role in shaping society. The enduring legacy of the book as a powerful vehicle for social transformation is just as significant today as it was over five hundred years ago. Contemporary artists’ books can serve as powerful catalysts within the classroom and in the community to foster conversations that address social justice issues and to generate dialog that can lead to greater understanding. This article will focus on how one liberal arts college library has promoted artists’ books in conversations to explore cultural competency and to encourage understanding.

What challenges does metadata managers face when embarking on a Linked Data transformation? How can legacy projects be better understood to ensure such data remodels stay true to their original content? Current efforts made by the Getty Provenance Index elucidate how this task can be much more than simple data re-structuring, and how much manual and specialized labor goes into updating a 35 year old database.

An internationally recognized presence in the documentation of Indic and South East Asian art and architecture, the Center for Art and Archaeology (CA&A) of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) conducted a documentation project in 2007 that explored an interesting range of built heritage arrayed along a 16th-century highway, the Agra – Lahore route, laid by the Mughal rulers of India. The stretch of the Agra – Lahore highway this project traced, crossed two north Indian states of independent India – Haryana and Punjab, and documented built heritage that survives on that road. The documentation revealed edifices unique to a travel environment including Caravansarai (rest house), Kos-Minars (distance markers), bridges, stepped-wells and Bagh (pleasure gardens) built under the patronage of Mughal elites. The project emphasized the importance of identifying the strands of cultural heritage and the processes of documenting them. A major aim of such documentation was to aid preservation of the monuments themselves by providing critical information for future decisions.

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.

How can special collections and archives (SCA) services contribute to the development of creativity in higher education students? An understanding of how creativity is developed can help those who work with special collections and archives to better design sessions that facilitate this development. Creativity is defined, put in context, and discussed as a metacognitive process. SCA as an environment that can contribute to the development of creativity is explored, along with the importance of the learner voice and pedagogical tools that allow for the facilitation of metacognitive experiences.

After six years of formal art training in Europe, I returned home in the late 1960s very much influenced by modern western art and its secular utopian worldview. However, when viewed from a religious perspective, modern art evidenced the process of secularization and humanization. Local scholars lamented such art could led to the gradual loss of the nation's tradition which is steeped in spirituality. To them, Western-trained Malaysian artists’ works are a reflection of a captive mentality glorifying art that is spiritually debilitating, sociologically alienating and psychologically corrupting. Concerned with such phenomenon in Malaysia's post-Independence period, the government convened the National Cultural Congress (1971), to harness the cultural power in fostering unity in her multicultural society. Among the three resolutions recommended, one was Islam, as Malaysia's official religion, it would play a vital role in the formulation of a national cultural identity. In view of this historic event, I made a u-turn denouncing modern art, ingrained in me for decades, and made Islam as the raison d‘être of my art by responding to the challenges of NCC. This paper therefore, will extrapolate my five-decade artistic trajectory from Western-centric art period to Malay-Islamic art from 1970s -2018.

Works of book art can express archival and documentary values. Book artists whose work is informed by archival and documentary evidence contribute to the wider dissemination of original sources. In supporting this function, their generative practices can be viewed as curatorial and editorial functions. How does archivally informed book art represent and communicate evidence? How can these sources operate as documentary sources? This essay offers a discussion of these questions.

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.

Archivists and art librarians are well versed in developing activities and projects using archives and library materials in object-based learning activities and engaging artists and creative practitioners with archives and special collections. But what does framing the uses of archives as creative activity really mean for the way in which we work on a practical level? I expand this question from the initial blog post I wrote: Possibilities of archives (storyingthepast.wordpress.com). Can we, like the creative practitioners we engage with, be truly creative – and if so, what could this look like? It is a pertinent question because creativity, in part, enables us to progress and innovate as the archive and library sectors continue to evolve.

I take an interdisciplinary approach to developing workshops as demonstrative case studies, with intersections from archival theory, education, and the visual arts; I first outline what creativity could look like when developing Creative Workshops from within an archival context. I also outline and reflect on how being creative can be beneficial to our profession as well as to the wider arts communities who engage with art archives and special collections.

The Cabell Screen, a 400 square foot media display installed on the façade of James Branch Cabell Library is a recent venue for artistic and scholarly expression at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. Spanning two floors of the main academic library building, the Cabell Screen displays curated electronic exhibitions of still and moving images to thousands of people who walk by the building each day. With no additional budget or staffing, a committee of librarians developed a mission statement, content strategy, and workflows to program and promote content. While the Cabell Screen uses a specific type of technology, the practices established at VCU Libraries can be applied to a range of budgets and media, including projections and monitors, to create a dedicated electronic exhibition space.

Collection development at Monash University Library aims to fulfil the research and curriculum needs of university staff and students. To support the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), collection development operates as a collaboration between academic faculty and the Subject Librarian. In order to further develop this collaboration and to encourage the selection and use of design resources by authors from diverse backgrounds, design lecturers and library staff have initiated The Equity Collection project. The aim of the project is to investigate the diversity of the collection in its current state and to improve its ability to reflect and extend the multicultural nature of the university community. The project includes a campaign to collect and promote books from the design world authored by under-represented groups, including Indigenous Australians, people of colour, and female and non-binary authors. This project is unique in its utilisation of the expertise of the design faculty who have extensive knowledge of authors, small publishers and less widely distributed publications.

The Australian National Botanic Gardens plays an important role in the study and promotion of Australia's diverse range of unique plants through its living collection, scientific research activities and also through the art collection held in the institution's Library and Archives. Australia's history of formal botanical illustration began with the early voyages of discovery with its popularity then declining until the modern day revival in botanical art. The Australian National Botanic Gardens Library and Archives art collection holds works from the Endeavour voyage through to the more contemporary artists of Celia Rosser, Collin Woolcock, Gillian Scott and Aboriginal artists including Teresa Purla McKeeman as well as photographs and outdoor installations.

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 are sketchbooks collected, organized, indexed and made accessible in the UK's memory institutions? My research is outlined, describing how, through interviews and a questionnaire sent to sketchbook-holding institutions, they are acquired, who they are accessed by, problems faced by those accessing them, the extent to which sketchbooks can be handled and examined physically, and the benefits and consequences of digitization and online access of sketchbooks. Finally, institutions offer ideas on how access to sketchbooks can be improved.

Responding to widespread changes in the role of the museum library, the National Gallery Library is adapting to join the research conversations within the institution, as well as in the wider arenas of art history and library history. Using the historic Eastlake Library as a focus, the library has been embarking on projects on several fronts: cataloguing rare books online; selective digitisation; collaboration with the Digital Cicognara project; publishing our own research; and establishing an innovative Collaborative Doctoral Partnership as one way of creating research opportunities for others.