In creating an oral history collection documenting the stories of those impacted by the Chimney Tops 2 Wildfires, efforts were made to make these stories accessible to a wide audience and representative of the communities affected by the disaster. The University of Tennessee Libraries’ recent implementation of the International Image…[Read more]

Visual literacy skills empower learners in any academic research process, and in critically navigating our networked and media-saturated lives. Teaching visual literacy can start with tools readily available to library educators and with competencies learners already possess. In this case study, two presenters from a large public university…[Read more]

The Library of Congress Classification System (LCC) and its subject headings (LCSH) are not neutral; they show the biases of the society that created them. Nor is this a new conversation in librarianship. As early as 1971, Sanford Berman argued that LCSH were deeply intrenched in white, male, Eurocentric power structures in his text, Prejudices…[Read more]

This presentation shares efforts to digitise glass plate negatives as part of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. It provides examples of projects and individual records and also mentions the use of Zooniverse for crowdsourcing metadata. It was given as part of the “Preserving Photographic Glass Plates: Conservation and Access in…[Read more]

This lightning talk shared experiences with designing and implementing an asynchronous co-curricular visual literacy program. The interactive tutorial introduced students to fair use, public domain, and Creative Commons images and included an active learning component where students created their own fun and lighthearted memes using new visual…[Read more]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fluxus co-founder Wolf Vostell (1932–1998) used concrete as an actual material for his unique body of work, including the Betonbuch [Concrete Book]. Vostell’s Concrete Book is a concrete slab in the shape of a book, measuring 34x25x4.5 cm, weighing about 9 kg (20 pounds) that is believed to encapsulate a copy of…[Read more]

Discussion of early years of the Art Libraries Society of North America with some focus on related professional organizations and on cataloging. Part of a 50th anniversary panel entitled “Who Were We? Where Did We Go?”

Tilt West is a Denver-based non-profit that engages in publication activities as well as hosting community round tables. The board members are supported by a team from the region’s budding arts and culture community. Founded to “elevate, amplify, and support the growing arts and culture scene in Colorado,” Tilt West believes in the essential rol…[Read more]

The Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London launched Explore the Collections in February 2021. This dynamic new platform was a project two years in the making. It’s an ambitious endeavor that brings together silos of information from the V&A’s collection, online editorial content, holdings from the National Art Library, and the museum arc…

ThingStor: A Material Culture Database for Finding Objects in Literature & Visual Art is an open-access resource supported by the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. It was created by Dr. Martin Brückner, together with a multi-departmental group of undergraduate and graduate students at the University. There are…[Read more]

The anthropocene, a new geological period defined by humanity’s indelible mark on nature, is a topic of great interest among scholars in various disciplines. One doesn’t need to look far to discover a wealth of literature, datasets, news articles, and documentaries exploring the topic. However, it is rare that we see attempts to capture this phe…[Read more]

The Visionary Futures Collective (VFC) represents students, scholars and staff working in higher education or in academic-adjacent roles. All work in or around humanities disciplines, and are “increasing transparency, sharing vulnerability, and working collectively to imagine and create a better future for higher education.” One must dig a bit dee…[Read more]