The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). His collection of five thousand early imprints comprises foundational literature of art and archaeology, and includes a diverse range of publications in all areas of the visual arts. Our partnership's 21st- century effort advances Cicognara's Enlightenment-era ideals by making digital copies of his library available through an open access web application, where they will be fully searchable from a centralized database as well as relevant subject research interfaces. The aggregated images and text offer a potentially transformative opportunity for the discipline of art history and allied disciplines. By offering a new interface for Cicognara's collection, the endeavour allows open access availability to nearly all of the key historical volumes, the illustrations within, and the searchable metadata. The Digital Cicognara Library offers a corpus that will allow scholars to ask and answer new questions in disciplines beyond art history and archaeology, and will offer scholars of early printed books a new access point to study both the individual volumes and their relationship to each other in an accessible digital collection.

Located on Treaty #13 (Toronto Purchase) territory, OCAD University offers an Indigenous Visual Culture (INVC) program that leads to a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree or an interdisciplinary minor. The curriculum combines courses in the cultural, social and political history of Indigenous peoples, preparing students to engage in global discourses in contemporary art practice through a profound understanding of story-telling as the foundation of visual culture.

A narrative framework is used to present an information literacy interaction with an INVC course from the perspectives of a librarian from the Canadian settler population and an assistant professor, who is a member of the Métis Indigenous nation. Research and evaluation models are presented; ones that emerged from traditional information literacy concepts informed and transformed by Indigenous knowledge systems. Finally, student learning outcomes from the course are presented through an exhibition of artworks and artist statements that display their visual story-telling skills.

‘Inspiration’ is a concept that comes up frequently in the Library and Information Science literature on artists and designers. But what do we mean by ‘inspiration’? This article discusses a selection of the psychological research on creativity and inspiration, as well as four information behaviour theories that help in finding inspiration - browsing, information encountering, satisficing, and serendipity.

The PHAROS consortium of fourteen international art historical photo archives is digitizing the over 20 million images (with accompanying documentation) in its combined collections and has begun to construct a common access platform using Linked Open Data and the ResearchSpace software. In addition to resulting in a rich and substantial database of images for art-historical research, the PHAROS initiative supports the development of shared standards for mapping and sharing photo archive metadata, as well as for best practices for working with large digital image collections and conducting computational image analysis. Moreover, alongside their digitization efforts, PHAROS member institutions are considering the kinds of art-historical questions the resulting database of images could be used to research. This article indicates some of the prospective research directions stimulated by modern technologies, with the aim of exploring the epistemological potential of photographic archives and challenging the boundaries between the analogue and the digital.

This article focuses on the research that the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art has conducted with users in the process of digitising its photo archive. Converting this resource from photographs mounted on card to digital assets appears, at first glance, a relatively straightforward digitisation project. However, the questions, challenges and issues raised by this project have prompted us to not only focus on the ‘how’ (the process of this conversion), but also the ‘why’. As the project has progressed, these questions about why we are digitising our photo archive and what benefit/s this will have to users and its impact on the field of British art history in the future have grown more voluble.

In 2017 the National Gallery of Ireland was awarded funding from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (DCHG) for the development of an online resource, focusing on its Irish art research collections. Entitled Source – Uncovering Stories of Art in Ireland, this multi-annual project aims to catalogue and digitise the collections in the ESB CSIA and ensure that these valuable collections relating to Ireland's artistic history and memory are preserved and can be easily accessed by researchers. Now in its penultimate year, Source will be launched in 2021.

What are the ethics behind caring, preserving, and displaying artwork created by Residential School Survivors? By looking at sketches and small handicrafts held by the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre this piece examines the possibilities for caring for this unique type of Indigenous artwork in a culturally appropriate and ethical manner.

This article discusses the illustrative material found within the Paris Commune Collection held in the Special Collections of The University of Sussex, and focuses on how values and opinions were communicated through the use of sartorial cartoons and caricatures. Approaches from a range of disciplines including art, librarianship, archives and education have been employed, highlighting the value of cartoons as both pieces of art and valuable communication devices, alongside the importance of the collection for teaching, and wider importance of using archive material within teaching.

Through a close examination of the UC San Diego Visual Arts and Architecture Digital Collections, this article reviews the context of the UC San Diego Library's Digital Collection including the tools leveraged to create a successful digital library environment and the importance of cultivating relationships with content donors, including challenges and opportunities. Marketing and publicity of digital collections as part of the project lifecycle will also be discussed, as well as the importance of advocating for arts content within the library's digital collection.

In this article, the documenta Archive is read ‘against the grain’, that is, not in search for art-historically relevant information, but, instead, so as to find traces of subjective biases in its structure and/or emotional contents in its records. The aim of this exercise is to examine the subjective nuances in the archival structure, which every archive preserves even if these are not intentionally recorded. These nuances provide glimpses into an intellectual construction that is otherwise hidden.

The PHAROS consortium is adopting the Linked Art data model to make its descriptions of photo archives collections available as Linked Open Data to further support scholars in their research. Linked Art is both a community and a data model. As an international community, it works together to create a shared data model to describe art. As a data model, it is a data profile of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and using Linked Open Data techniques. The goal of Linked Art is to enable museums and developers to engage in LOD initiatives more easily by providing them with shared data modelling decisions and consistent design principles.

Library work now has a role to play when it comes to decolonisation. This article outlines what Goldsmiths Library, University of London is doing, through the Liberate our Library initiative, to diversify and decolonise its collections and practices against the backdrop of worldwide movements for education and social justice led by both students and academics to challenge the dominance of the ‘Westernised university’.2

Examples of how we are doing this work are explained using critical librarianship as our guide, whilst recognising that we are still developing expertise in this evolving field of practice. This decolonisation work also uses critical race theory (CRT) as a means to dismantle racial inequality and its impact on higher education.

Here, I would like to acknowledge the excellent and inspirational content of ALJ, Critical Librarianship: Special Issue (v.44, no.2) and I see this article as an ongoing companion piece.

Goldsmiths Library's liberation work endeavours to empower its users with critical thinking and study skills whilst conducting their research using hierarchical systems and resources which in themselves are in the process of being decolonised.

Decolonising a library collection and a profession must of course always begin or at least happen in tandem with the self, through a process that Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o describes as ‘decolonising the mind.’3

This article shows how large donations of books have transformed the library of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in recent years. Not only have they augmented the collection but they have enhanced the Centre's wider outreach effort and its ability to engage with new audiences.

This article details the process involved in making the collections of the University of Stirling Archives and Art Collection available online. Our new online catalogue http://collections.stir.ac.uk allows researchers to search across our CALM for archives catalogue and our Art Collection Adlib catalogue to uncover the depth and breadth of the cultural collections on offer at the University of Stirling.

The photography collection of the German documentation centre for art history, Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (DDK), comprises more than 2.8 million objects. These include roughly 500,000 glass negatives, of which nearly 3,000 were made by the first Hessian state conservator Ludwig Bickell between 1870 and 1901. These early glass plates show a large number of retouchings and traces of their production and usage. This makes them rich sources for photographic and art historical or cultural historical research as well as conservation studies.

Is the internet a tool for democracy or the manifestation of the global digital divide? Using the colonization of the internet as a starting point, this article outlines some current issues with knowledge equity, asking if democratic open access products like Wikipedia are the solution or another manifestation of the systemic bias of society. Whilst acknowledging librarianship has its own colonial legacies to address, the suggestion is made that critical librarianship can provide a response in the form of library–based edit-a-thons and Wikipedia workshops. These show how the power of Wikipedia can be used responsibly not just for enabling critical information literacy, but as an instrument for activism. In considering librarian interventions done so far at the University of the Arts, London, the article outlines future practical possibilities for decolonization, as well as looking more widely at how to democratize information in open access products and the Western publishing that sits behind them.