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.

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.

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.

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.

The British Museum's collection represents the history of British collecting taste since its founding in 1753. Over this time span, many important collectors have played a pivotal role in the development of the British Museum's South Asian collection. Through various acquisition methods, a number of illustrated manuscripts, albums, and photographical archives have been acquired for the museum's permanent collection. This development has coincides with the growing reference collection in the Department of Asia Library. With changes in collection practices, there is a growing question about the appropriateness of audio-visual and multimedia acquisitions for both the museum and the Department of Asia Library. A select history of the South Asian collection is presented alongside the development of the research collections and exploration into digital repositories.

In the spring of 2017 I was fortunate enough to receive the ARIAH-RIHA Professional Exchange Fellowship that allowed me to travel to London and conduct research there for a month. While in London I looked closely at the collections, services, and clientele of several important art libraries in London but the main focus of my investigation was the photo archive collections that make up a part of many of these art libraries. The photo archives in my own institution at the Yale Center for British Art and our efforts toward digitisation, discovery, and open access made my close examination of similar collections in London particularly relevant – I wished to see how these libraries approached similar challenges and if these institutions share a common understanding of photo archives.

Librarians, archivists, and curators today meet unique challenges when facing huge numbers of photographs accumulated in their institutions. Coming to terms with these masses in a responsible way means to reflect on cataloguing and digitization standards able to record their (material) complexity. It also means to constantly justify a series of investments: in cataloguing and digitization projects, but also in storage space, restoration, archival and conservation materials, not to speak of human resources. It means, ultimately, to reflect on the systems of value that one decides to apply while dealing with these holdings: the dematerialization rhetoric that often goes hand-in-hand with digitization campaigns tends to increase their fragility, on the other side we are confronted more and more often with the ‘contemporary repackaging of erstwhile ephemeral and disposable photographic prints' that acquire a new ‘archival value’.1 In this short essay I will focus on these systems of value. My aim is to offer some methodological tools to deal with documentary photographs in art historical institutions. These instruments derive from the intersection of photographic and archival theories and practices that shaped my experience as Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute, for more than a decade.