‘It all started with us being fed up of hearing Marshall McLuhan's name once too often in our Visual Communication MA at the Royal College of Art. We wish we could have kept a tally of how many times his name came up.’1 This is how our book Not a Reference Yet starts. In this text we are going back to the beginning of our venture and what got us started. Simply put, we noticed a missing gap in the references we were looking for. Digging a little deeper, we started to see the mechanisms in place that stop a reference from being found or even to exist in the first place. We are both graphic designers and, in this research, we focus on our own industry, however, this problem seems to be fairly universal and applies to many industries – especially those in which representation plays a big role.

How are women represented, specifically women of colour, in architecture library collections? I focus on two major trade periodicals to find out: Architectural Review (a British publication) and Architectural Record (American). I analyse firms highlighted in these periodicals in 2019, researching the proportion of women in leadership per each featured company. I compare against demographic and occupational statistics in the respective countries to see if these periodicals accurately represent the field, or further reinforce antiquated notions. My findings suggest that who the periodicals highlight is roughly proportionate or more diverse than the field itself, but the field continues to mostly represent white men as successful architects. Library collections reify that notion. In order to decentre the monolithic nature of many library collections, I further suggest approaches to increasing diversity based on my own initiatives.

This article evaluates the transformation of a library in a small contemporary art institution into a large-scale organization, providing the essential infrastructure for research in Istanbul, Turkey, from 2001 onwards. It explains how Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center's (2001-2010) library and archive collection were established and became part of SALT Research with other cultural entities in 2011. Focusing on the motivations behind SALT's founding, the article discusses the formation of SALT Research, which comprises a library, archive and learning platform. It presents the changing positions of the institution regarding developing library tools, user needs, and the pandemic.

In my last years of teaching at the University of Leeds (2019-20), I invited all first-year Fine Art and Art History students to meet me in the circular Reading Room of University of Leeds Library. I felt that, for many students arriving at university, the space, form, function and use of a research, or even a reference, library might be inhibiting, alien at worst and certainly overwhelming. My aim was to get them inside, and to then explore the Library as an architectural-spatial text written with books ordered and spaced according to classification systems that already encode and pre-frame their fields of knowledge amidst other discrete fields. Moreover, my lectures to them would question the system of classifying art and its histories laid out for them in the library. I might indeed deeply challenge this ‘order of things’ (to quote Michel Foucault.)1

Collection development for the arts at large research universities presents certain issues that can be challenging for the librarians responsible. Some of these issues include: collaborating with other selectors, managing multiple library locations, preventing unnecessary duplication, acquiring non-traditional material, working with non-academic publishers, and varying circulation policies. In this article, the Librarian for the Fine Arts and the Head of the Institute of Fine Arts Library at New York University will discuss their experience navigating these challenges in the first two and a half years of their collaboration. The authors will present strategies for leveraging these challenges as opportunities and will share the benefits they have experienced from this effort.

The Art and Design School Libraries (ADSL) Division of ARLIS/NA was tasked with preparing a report on the state of ADSLs across North America. The report team offered preliminary results at the ADSL Division Annual Meeting in May 2021. At the ARLIS/UK & Ireland conference in July 2021, they described Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) activities in ADSLs and some of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sector. Feedback from both events was incorporated into the report, which is now complete and available on the “Publications” page of the ARLIS/NA website. This article, in addition to summarizing some of the findings, discusses the collaborative process of writing and editing the report and the importance of this process as a model for advancing other essential work in this field.

Although reading lists are an important part of curricula and play an essential role in decolonizing education, the work to diversify them can often neglect intersectional approaches that consider both racialized and gendered dimensions of knowledge construction. The consequence can be an additive approach in which black authors and authors of colour are included to diversify reading lists, reproducing racist and sexist biases. This paper examines how reading lists are constructed in curricula and presents an alternative decolonial feminist approach to creating a reading list in fashion design. The value of decolonial feminism lies in addressing the gaps in thinking by using a racialized and gendered framework. The Decolonizing the Curriculum Toolkit project at Westminster University, UK is introduced to which the author contributed a Decolonising Fashion Design Reading List, as an example of counter-hegemonic curricula which aimed to reveal the unequal power dynamics that support colonial logics in fashion design education. Exposing hegemonic distinctions in fashion that represent Western fashion as modern and non-Western fashion as traditional can then allow marginalized and excluded fashion narratives to become centred. Such an approach can then provide a key tool towards building a more pluralised and de-hierarchised set of fashion design resources.

As any art librarian who works with MFA students can attest, many artists loathe writing. It's unsurprising, then, that the thesis paper is one of the most stressful, angst-ridden experiences in an art graduate student's career. This paper explores a possible new role for the art librarian as an editor and writing coach – a ‘midwife’ for students working through the thesis writing process. The author shares information on establishing this role and offers guidance for colleagues who may wish to try similar efforts at their institutions.

The covid-19 pandemic instigated a rapid digital shift in UK higher education libraries, changing the way teaching was delivered. The digital shift of the pandemic meant library teaching was reimagined for online delivery, however pedagogical principles were challenged by new ways of working. How can a pedagogical approach for art and design librarianship adapt to online delivery when grounded in embodied, material and sensory experiences? Taking a reflective approach which brings together personal experience with discussion of selected literature, this article explores how pedagogical approaches to art and design librarianship have been continually reshaped by the pandemic.

My artistic practice has always drawn heavily from archival research and has used strategies of reproduction to underscore the archive as a living object. By disrupting the perceived fixity of the archive and recovering its heterogeneity my work reveals hierarchies of power that play out across class, gender, sexuality, caste, race, and geography.

Annelys Devet is the co-founder of Disarming Design from Palestine, a non-profit organization with a mission to contribute through design to international solidary and social justice surrounding the Palestinian cause. Although the organization performs as a design label that promotes Palestinian voices, it also functions as a network that collects and archives “the traces of exchange.” The organization opened a physical “relational library” when it was operated a facility, Hosh Jalsa, in the Old City of Birzeit. The space had to close due to Covid, but the organization and the (now digital) library have continued the overall mission. The organization's website can be found at www.disarmingdesign.com.

This paper gathers interim results of a study on the accessibility of artistic research. Since no corresponding subject portal could be found, a specific data collection was started. Due to the study's background in Switzerland, the resulting DataBase for Applied, Fine and Performing Arts (AFPA-DB) focusses mostly on the German-speaking and European countries, while aiming to be expanded in the future. After summarizing the formal findings of the study, the authors explore the challenges that occurred during the research process. Their struggle in finding and/or accessing artistic research seems to be characteristic of the field and is therefore likely to affect similar projects in other academic art libraries.

The authors discuss a bibliographical collection focused on ballet, the personal library of the Brazilian writer and academic of Galician descent Nélida Piñon. The academic donated her private library to Instituto Cervantes Rio de Janeiro in 2022.

This article is based on a paper presented at 'Challenges of art librarianship: 2020 and beyond'.1

This paper explores the dimensions of visual history in the digital age. Do digital repositories offer newer paradigms in art historical research? At the most elementary level, it can be easily said that digital tools do allow for closer scrutiny and analysis of art objects with respect to its material composition. A deeper question that needs to be explored is whether the digital age allows for newer theoretical approaches to doing art history. As inventories, museums, art galleries and libraries have been digitizing their collections, there has been a definite shift in the ways of seeing art objects due to the comfort and ease of digital devices. Given the fact that artifacts have a historical process of conceptualization, production, circulation and reception, historical art objects can be seen as a unique entry point into the larger global history of circulation of art works right from the time of their initial production to their later reproduction in print and finally to the times of digitization.