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 recent years we have noticed a substantial increase in interest in our archive collections at the E H McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. With circulation figures for print publications generally reported to be on a downward trend for libraries, unique material is being eagerly sought out.

Who are our new audiences and how do they engage with archives in varying ways? What specific approaches have contributed to achieving this positive shift? Including observations from other research librarians and archivists, this article provides a view of art archive use and users, as well as the mechanisms that are proving successful. Our aim is to increase the visibility of our special collections to facilitate the unlocking of their powerful potential for the understanding and, sometimes, making of art.

How to answer this question? I guess I began my career as a librarian at a party. Newly possessing what I already knew was a useless (in capitalist terms, at least) MA in Art History, I had moved to New York City to be closer to my family, and to stay up all night at MisShapes parties and eat pizza at dawn. I was working in marketing for Forbes Magazine, as you do when you're 24 and need to pay the bills and have no idea what you want to do with your life. It wasn't long after the financial collapse of 2008, when job prospects were very low, that a friend of a friend who had just finished library school at Pratt handed me a drink at a party and said, ‘you like writing and researching, if you don't want to be a teacher, why don't you become a librarian?’

It has art and libraries, but it is not a traditional art library. The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) holds extensive imagery and art collections from across two hundred years, a range of locations and breadth of subject matter by professional and talented amateur artists. As a young museum we are discovering the shared heritage and scope of our collections, and the challenges of combining and exhibiting them from six constituent museums.

The National Gallery of Australia Research Library and Archives (NGARL&A) offers unique collections and provides vital services within the contemporary Australian art world, but there has been a seismic shift in their users and use. This paper will explore the impact this change has had on our roles as art archivists and provide insight into new ways these collections are being used.

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.

The Library Examined was a workshop held in January 2018 at Senate House Library, University of London. The workshop was designed and facilitated by Heiba Lamara and Rose Nordin from OOMK and Hudda Khaireh from Thick/er Black Lines in discussion with Laurence Byrne and Leila Kassir, Research Librarians at Senate House Library. The Library Examined was aimed at non-library-card-holders with the ambition to help demystify library processes and spaces and to provide a forum for the discussion and critiquing of the organisation of knowledge within the library. This article describes in the first three sections the librarians’ view of the workshop and why it was initiated, before Heiba and Hudda outline their invitation and research, and the workshop itself.

A version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of ARLIS UK & Ireland held at the Architectural Association, London, in July 2018.

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.

This article presents an insider view of engagement with critical librarianship in a higher education and arts library context. The gains from this engagement include a stronger voice in institutional dialogue and collaboration, and the development of exploratory practices in collection development and information literacy that are increasingly informed by critical perspectives.

Our experiences and examples of emerging practise highlight some of the complexities and ambiguities of critical librarianship, around novelty, compliance, institutionalisation, and the challenge of how we convert these theoretical insights into the power structures at play in libraries and archives into meaningful changes for the benefit of all of our students.

Ultimately the conclusion is that if we recognise these power structures, and the particular role of the library in knowledge production, consumption and validation, we must take critically informed action.

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū re-opened in 2015 with a new type of audiotour. Out went commentary from our own curators and in came poetry, music, personal reminiscence, field trips and voices from the archives. All professionally recorded, edited and directed. This decision was made after fixing on a few basic rules, foremost of which was that looking at the ART in an ART gallery must come first and that anything that detracts from that is to be deprecated. Rule two was only to use audio when there is something to say. This presentation is a report on what we did, how visitors reacted and what we hope to do next. Our collection is small and our means limited, so our methods could be easily copied at other museums and galleries.

If I'm being honest I still feel as though I am a bit of an imposter in the world of art librarianship. I often feel as though I have a very conservative, corporate and conformist approach to librarianship within the art library environments in which I work. I also often feel naïve when it comes to discussing and affirming ‘what makes art librarianship different?’ Acknowledging such naivety, I will also openly admit that until last year I had not heard of ‘critical librarianship’ as a concept, let alone ‘critical (art) librarianship’, which is how I was introduced to it at a day-long conference held by colleagues from the University of the Arts London in 2018 at Chelsea College of Arts.

This paper will demonstrate the way low-cost WYSIWYG websites can be used as a method of storing and disseminating information in a museum context, as illustrated by the internal website – MoKnow – developed by the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) library. Websites like Google Sites can be used to share resources with a range of in-house users – from curators to front of house staff – in an easy-to-access manner. Quick to set up, these sites can be used to share text and bibliographic information, store PDFs and other documents, and link to images, videos and websites, thereby providing users with an intuitive and quick method of accessing information relevant to the institution and its collection. As Mona library manager, Mary Lijnzaad notes, the website MoKnow, “started as a digital version of the old school vertical filing cabinets… it was simply a way of not having to store vast amounts of physical information.” However, six years after the original site's creation, the website's purpose and scope continues to evolve in response to the changing nature of online resources and the demands of the institution. The paper will also examine some of the challenges and restrictions associated with using such sites, including copyright, ownership, changing technologies, and confidentiality concerns.