After just recently returning from the ARLIS UK & Ireland's 2024 annual conference, “Artificial visions: Navigating the intersection of AI and art libraries,” my head has been swimming with all sorts of considerations as we move into this new world of artificial intelligence. The potential, the risks, the ethical concerns, the environmental impact, how it changes the idea of authorship, how it may change the library labor market are all things we're going to have to start addressing as a profession. I don't think I've been to a conference that has sent me home with so much to contemplate. It was a terrific, informative, and a tiny bit terrifying three days at UAL Central St. Martins. Despite my, hopefully unfounded, fears that we are now all standing at the edge of an epistemological abyss, all presenters and organizers should be very proud of the outcome.
Although I'm sure Alj will be publishing articles derived from the 2024 conference presentations soon, in this issue we have three articles derived from presentations at last year's conference in Norwich. In “Displaying sound: the National Poetry Library's vinyl collection, 2019-2024,”
Will René, an Assistant Librarian at the National Poetry Library in London, discusses a project to make a previously less-than-accessible collection of vinyl albums of spoken word poetry available to the public. René discusses the theoretical and practical considerations of facilitating interaction with these fragile objects in their original form.
In a somewhat poetic coincidence originating from the same conference, Arts and Humanities Librarian Stefanie Hilles and Professor of Studio Art Robert Robbins, both of Maimi University in Ohio, discuss using “book spine poetry” to engage art students in their article “Serendipitous discovery: The art library as place for creative exploration.” They provide a detailed description of the collaboration, demonstrating how the library can function as a discovery tool for studio art students.
In another article that originated as a short demonstration at the 2023 conference, Jessa Mockridge, Subjects Librarian for Art Design & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, discusses building an archive of the Women's Art Library on the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing, an artist driven, open-source database of artists’ books and publications. In “Category is… The Women's Art Library: Queering metadata with the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing,” Mockridge uses examples from the archive to show how “gorgeous, unruly catalogue records trouble, disrupt and bend metadata for queer use.”
Sezin Romi, Senior Librarian and Archivist at Salt in Turkey, examines the role of the archive as part of a cultural institution. In “Archiving as knowledge production: Research practices at Salt,” Romi explores the function of research institutions, such as Salt, and the changing role archives play in preservation and dissemination of information.
Finally, in an account of that probably sends a chill down most librarians’ spines, Research Resources Librarian Helen Olafsson and Assistant Librarian for Cataloging and Classification Fiona Doig, both of the University of Dundee, provide a detailed account of reclassifying an entire library. In “Reclassification of an art and design library,” they discuss the history of the project, the decisions that had to be made, and the practicalities of reclassifying and relabeling the 84,000-piece collection.
I would like to thank all the contributors to this issue, and I hope everyone enjoys reading these articles as much as I did. Incidentally, this is the last issue of volume 49, which seems like a bit of a milestone. On to volume 50!
