If you lead, you will face a crisis. Of all the demands made on leaders, crisis leadership is probably the most challenging, and it is the one they are least prepared to handle properly due to lack of experience and skills. While thinking ahead about how to respond in a crisis can help, it really comes down to whether each leader’s personal e…[Read more]

This paper explores the commodification of archival information through the exploitation of library labor related to the ongoing management, preservation, description, and digitization of unique and rare materials. Through this discussion, the author highlights the cultural, social, and economic factors that play a central role in creating an…[Read more]

An introduction to accessing academic publications for staff working in public libraries.

Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear — the…[Read more]

The Exhibition Library reimagines the medium of art exhibition as well as that of art catalogue. Catalogues carry exhibitions through time and space, figuring as tropes for imagining arrangements and the course of works and settings they describe. However, they rarely give us a clue about what really happened, since they are often made before the…[Read more]

The Exhibition Library reimagines the medium of art exhibition as well as that of art catalogue. Catalogues carry exhibitions through time and space, figuring as tropes for imagining arrangements and the course of works and settings they describe. However, they rarely give us a clue about what really happened, since they are often made before the…[Read more]

This essay is partly a response + riposte to Johanna Drucker’s Jan. 2014 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” and partly a plea for the University, and the Humanities, along with their publishing “arms,” to be refashioned, not as sites of cultural Authority from which Knowledge…[Read more]

A 5-page paper discussing the Linear signage and visual aspects of a Linear B tablet from Thebes, Greece, apparently discovered in the 1990s.

Relative to many of the ongoing discussions and debates around the changing (and often precarious) landscapes of scholarly publishing, and especially around Open Access publishing, we at punctum books have put together a sort of “primer” (which also serves as our own, expanded vision statement) on what we see as the perils of the commodification…[Read more]

This article explores a unique series of caricatures made between 1884 and 1896 by Yusuf Franko Kusa, a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and a vener- ated member of n-de-siècle Pera’s high society. Yusuf Franko’s hitherto unstudied caricatures were comparable to contemporary European caricatures in style, but their subject matter was very loca…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of design thinking as a component of, and contributor to, great library user experiences. When design thinking is used to shape the environment in which users connect with library spaces and personnel, the result is a better library experience—by design.

Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position r…[Read more]

The book demonstrates the invalidity of existing assumptions about the administrative nature of Linear B (“Mycenaean Greek”) and related objects, proposes an alternative revolving around cult art, and explores similar evidence relating to scripts and art from the same and other regions and periods.

With its focus on the achievement of painterly effects in photography , the international Pictorialist movement sought to employ various techniques and aesthetic approaches in order to capture images of landscapes and delicate feminine beauty within perfectly composed atmospheric settings. Facing the turn of the twentieth century, a time when the…[Read more]

The Music Library at the University of Washington is fortunate to count among its holdings a substantial collection of rare musical scores. A highlight of our special collections is the William Crawford III Music Collection. Given to the UW in 2014, the Crawford Collection includes over 700 rare, early-edition vocal scores, spanning six centuries…[Read more]

As librarians, we recognize that the ways in which our students access information are changing, rapidly and dramatically. The students we work with today face an information landscape that is often very different from what we remember from our student years. So much of what our music students need is seemingly readily available online through…[Read more]

The development of the use of computers and software in art from the Fifties to the present is explained. As general aspects of the history of computer art an interface model and three dominant modes to use computational processes (generative, modular, hypertextual) are presented. The “History of Computer Art” features examples of early…[Read more]

The core of the Conceptual artists (Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt; the Siegelaub group with Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner; English and American members of Art & Language) is situated in the art context of the late sixties and the first half of the seventies. The self-positioning of the Conceptual artists within the art…[Read more]

The outline of the development of Performance Art features happenings in New York and Vienna in the sixties as well as body art and performances with closed circuits in the seventies (among others). Action Art, Environmental Theater and Intermedia are the terms defining the main characteristics of the works discussed. The research method is mainly…[Read more]

Critlib, or critical librarianship, is the discussion and application of social justice issues in the library field. Generally, the application of critlib has been focused on information literacy and pedagogy, as well as cataloging, but one important aspect of the discussion that is often overlooked is that of library management. Just like…[Read more]