51st Annual Conference

Invitation Only.

The Leadership Institute is open to all incoming, standing, and outgoing leaders of ARLIS/NA constituent groups.

This year we will continue our work on the Strategic Plan, building off our newly developed Mission, Vision, and Values statements to create Goals and Strategies.

Sponsored by
Bernett Penka Rare Books

This panel proposes to spark a conversation and bridge connections between art and design librarians working across North America, in a variety of contexts and settings. Five panelists representing large and small American institutions, including museums, digital humanities, and academic libraries, will discuss the current trends they are observing within a range of disciplines, including art history, architecture, studio art and design, museum collections and curating, and urban planning. We are each working with populations who are interested in artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies to develop creative works, investigate disciplinary questions, craft new solutions, and/or curate new collections. Once the realm of science fiction, the term AI was coined by American computer scientist John McCarthy in the 1950s, leading researchers to examine computer learning and its uses. As the machine-learning evolution has gained momentum over the last ten years, questions have arisen, such as: How can we ensure that we are not codifying societal biases and inequities into these new technologies? Are humans prepared to critically interrogate AI, NLP, and ML? How are creators working with these new technologies to innovate in their fields? How do we support and preserve these new works across their life cycle? How do we teach about them, describe them, pay attribution to both the AI and the human creator? Recent controversies over the DALL-E 2 technology illustrate some of these conundrums, as does the dismissal of a Google employee who claimed that AI has become sentient. On the other hand, AI has allowed artists and designers to create new, even international partnerships, generating groundbreaking development and marketing of innovative work, often external to art markets that may have once constrained such creativity. Given these questions, this panel poses the following questions of our profession: How can we support patrons, students, and creators as they work with these technologies? What can we be prepared for, and what can we leverage? And, what skills will be needed? After brief presentations, panelists will pose discussion prompts to the audience to learn what experiences attendees have had with AI at their respective institutions, including professional, research, and pedagogical applications. We hope that this session will lead to a better understanding of the trends, opportunities, challenges, and future of AI and affiliated technologies, as well as its uses within art, architecture, and design librarianship.

Sponsored by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
McGill University Libraries
University of Arkansas Libraries
University of New Mexico University Libraries

An Artist's Legacy Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the Mexican Mural Movement
Speaker: Malia Van Heukelem, Art Archivist Librarian, University of Hawaii at Manoa Library

Processing Donald Judd: A Look at an Artist-Endowed Archive
Speaker: Irene Lule, Project Archivist, Judd Foundation

Don't Ever Break the Chain: Using Archival Field Work in Ecuador to Create Links in the Textile Museum Collection
Speaker: Tracy Meserve, Librarian, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum

Striving for Ethical Stewardship in Special Collections Policy
Speakers: Ivy Blackman, Managing Librarian, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library

Transforming Value Within Art Publication Collecting Organizations 
​Speakers: Dallas Fellini, Collection, Inventory & Distribution Assistant, Art Metropole and Sara Maston, Communications & Data Coordinator, Art Metropole​​​

Moderator: Stephanie Fletcher, Illinois Institute of Technology

Building an International Research Portal
Speaker: Kristen Regina

Amplifying Access to Feminist Art: Cross-Institutional Collaboration to Create the Judy Chicago Research Portal
Speakers: Sharon Mizota, Binky Lush, Karen Schwenter

Prevalence of Ritual: Romare Bearden's Papers and Catalogue Raisonné Research
Speaker: Samantha Rowe

Transformation and Translation in a Digital Video Library
Speakers: Alexandra Provo, Daniel Howell, Leila Carbonell

Sponsored by
A&AePortal | Yale University Press
Getty Research Portal
Penn State University Libraries
The Wildenstein Plattner Institute

This panel brings together three speakers on the topic of letterpress printing in academic institutions around the world. With a revival of handpress printing, it is increasingly common for libraries to house working printing equipment within their spaces. We will consider how these facilities provide different types of patrons with unique research and learning opportunities. The conference theme of transformation is considered in different ways: setting type as an embodied method of learning about graphic design and history; printing as an activity that foregrounds process for library collections in an environment that centers product, and using 3D technologies to create affordable teaching tools that facilitate hands-on bibliographical instruction and research. While libraries have collected the printed word as long as it has been produced, situating the making of printed content within the library context is a relatively new, and growing, enterprise. It has been demonstrated that letterpress printing can form and strengthen engagement ties with communities for libraries. What else can a printing press help you do? This presentation will give an overview of our experiences setting up and running letterpress studios and provide three methods of examining how these spaces can transform research and learning. First, we show how students in disciplines as diverse as graphic design and history can benefit from course instruction in printing and book arts to deepen their understanding. Second, how letterpress in the library can open up the possibilities of a process-based orientation for institutions. And finally, reports on efforts of the 3Dhotbed project to build a community-populated repository of open-access, 3D-printable teaching tools for those engaging in bibliographical instruction and research.

Speakers
Jamie Vander Broek, Librarian for Art & Design, University of Michigan
Kyle Clark, Conservation Technician, Instructor & Liaison, Books Arts Studio, University of Michigan
 
Anne Goodfellow, Rare Books & Special Collections Liaison Librarian, Fisher Library, The University of Sydney
 
Courtney “Jet” Jacobs, Head of Public Services, Outreach, and Community Engagement, Library Special Collections, UCLA Library

Moderator
Jennifer Garland, Interim Head Librarian, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University

Sponsored by
McGill University Libraries
University of Michigan Library

Program reviews (a regular occurrence for academic departments) are becoming more commonplace for academic libraries. For most library workers, a library program review sounds like a thankless task intended only to illustrate the library's best side. However, that is the least effective way to approach library program review. In an era of "do more with less, the best thing you can do to advocate for your library is to tell the truth about its strengths and weaknesses through the official process of program review. In this session, attendees will learn the processes, tools, best practices, opportunities, and challenges of library program review. Although program review shares the structure of the accreditation process (self-study, external review, and response paper), it is a much more valuable assessment tool. The self-study portion can provide a deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses of the library by using guidelines, standards, and frameworks such as the ACRL Standards for Academic Libraries in Higher Education, ACRL Diversity Standards, and the ALA DEI Scorecard for Library and Information Organizations. The external reviewers are invited from peer libraries who best understand the library's issues. Finally, the response paper is the perfect launch pad for strategic planning within the library. Academic institutions that do program reviews likely have self-study and site visit templates. However, these templates are often not configured for libraries. For this reason, many libraries may have more autonomy in crafting the elements of their self-study and site visits to adequately address their needs. Panelists will explain how they retrofitted the templates, created new ones, and utilized software, as well as other ways they changed the typical process to better document the strengths and weaknesses of their libraries. Through panelists' recent experiences, you'll learn about this process from multiple perspectives, including heads of libraries/departments, internal review team staff, and external peer reviewers. The panelists whose libraries underwent reviews will address the challenges and opportunities of conducting their program reviews. They will discuss their desired outcomes and how well these were met by the process, their reviewers' report, and the reception from staff and administration. The reviewer panelist will outline their experience and the roadblocks they faced. All of the panelists will share lessons learned from the process. Overall, this session is a crash course on library program review--a rarely discussed but essential aspect of current academic libraries.

Sponsored by
Georgia State University Library

At the 50th Annual ARLIS/NA Conference in Chicago last year, Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) members coordinated a panel session discussing this collaborative project to capture and preserve at-risk web-based art materials. Since then, our project has accomplished major milestones including: expanding the collaborative entity to include nearly 40 organizations throughout North America; establishing a web collection of nearly 700 web-based art resources totaling over 7 TB of data with continued growth; and building a reference resource and public access portal to increase access and research using the web collections. This panel will provide updates on project accomplishments and the continued roadmap for future work and activities. Panelists will: give a brief overview of the project and its mission, highlighting member use cases on topics including the importance of digital preservation and the necessity of a model that leverages shared infrastructure, expertise and collecting activities amongst art libraries to scale the extent of web-published, born-digital materials preserved and accessible for art scholarship and research; discuss recent research use cases using the web collections, the development of the public access portal, and the findings from several collaborative data analysis workshops; and discuss sustainability planning to continue growth and success for the project.

How the Craft World Came Together in Oaxtepec: The Archives of the World Craft Council 7th General Assembly, 1976. 
Speaker: Beth Goodrich, Librarian, American Craft Council

The Delia Zapata Olivella Collection: Open Access to Afro-Colombian Performing Arts Resources
Speaker: Sara Lee Burd, Project Archivist, Vanderbilt University

Creating the Digital Florentine Codex: Using Multilingual Data to Access Transcultural Narratives
Speakers: Berenice Gaillemin, Getty Research Institute and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, Senior Project Manager, Getty Research Institute

De datos a data: Unpacking a Pre-Hispanic Art Dealer’s Archive
​Speakers: Alicia Maria Houtrouw, Getty Research Institute; Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Getty Research Institute; Kylie King, Independent Consultant

Moderator: Miguel Rosales, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 

Sponsored by
Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries, Vanderbilt University

The mention of Mexico City conjures certain iconic images to mind: an aerial view of the Palacio de Bellas Artes at dusk or sunlight dramatically striking a corner Luis Barragan's house near the Bosque Chapultepec, the carefully-arranged interiors of Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul or the pre-hispanic sculptural fragments of the Templo Mayor. In addition to photographing these well-known sites in the capital, nineteenth and twentieth-century photographers like Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Judith Sandoval, and Enrique Cervantes imagined the art and architecture of Mexico from new perspectives and transformed our understanding of them. Works of art in their own right, these photographs are also important resources for the study of art history, architecture, social history, and urbanism. This panel explores the photographic holdings of a range of North American academic and museum libraries that document Mexican art and architecture, with particular emphasis on resources related to Mexico City.
 
Esther Born and Mexican Modernism 
Speaker: Gwen Mayhew, Head of Collection Access, Canadian Centre for Architecture
                                                                                  
Mexico City Architecture through the Lens of Mexican Documentarians
Speaker: Carla Ellard, Photo Archivist, Alkek Library, Texas State University

Holdings by Enrique A. Cervantes at The Latin American Library
Speaker: Christine Hernández, Curator of Special Collections, The Latin American Library, Tulane University

Documenting the Mexican Mural Movement
Speaker: Malia Van Heukelem, Art Archivist Librarian, University of Hawaii at Manoa Library

Fluid Borders: Using Collections to Center Personal Narratives
Speaker: Stephanie Beene, Associate Professor, Fine Arts Librarian for Art, Architecture, & Planning, University of New Mexico

Most of us will have taken at least one, if not several, management classes in the course of our studies to become information professionals but have subsequently found that those classes are woefully inadequate to prepare us for the real-world experience of leading teams and performing the duties required of us as managers. As information professionals we are called upon to manage in a range of situations with varying levels of complexity, whether it's managing large or small teams, a single individual, or managing up your institutional hierarchy, understanding the challenges, as well as dispelling myths about leadership and management, will encourage individuals to take up leadership roles and ensure that they feel confident in their abilities.

Sponsored by Yale University Library