This article discusses how the Women's Art Library fosters creativity through the experience of the many artistic research practices hosted since the collection was installed in Goldsmiths University of London in the Library as a Special Collection.

What role can museums and libraries play in improving people's health and wellbeing? This is the question staff at the V&A Museum are exploring through Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST), a treatment designed for adults with early onset dementia, traditionally delivered in a clinical setting. Guided by experts from the dementia charity Resonate Arts and the NHS's Memory Service, V&A curators and librarians are discovering the great potential of the museum and its collections to improve and enrich lives.

At the request of the Middelheim Museum, artist Nico Dockx and art historian Johan Pas, from the ArchiVolt research group of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, undertook a survey of the museum's library collection. Between March 2022 and December 2023, they examined the phenomenon of artists' publications from a range of perspectives, through a series of conversations with artists, designers, publishers and collectors, a symposium, and the book A kind of a ‘Huh?’ Artists' publications: (Not) a user's manual. We discussed these and other related projects with them.

Critical librarianship has become embedded into the epistemological structure of the LIS profession. Those working in art libraries and the Art Libraries Journal have played no small role in this, fostering progressive discussions around issues of social injustice that orbit the library and its functions. Nevertheless, the kernel of critical theory that developed out of the Frankfurt School centred upon class and economics. Librarianship, especially art librarianship, continues to be a middle-class career requiring an expensive higher qualification to enter. This requirement indicates the contradictions operating within and around the sector. As the commodification of education continues to creep in, class and economics are urgent topics that demand to be addressed by the critical librarianship movement. Yet those who practice critical librarianship remain employees of this very system and as such, the question posed is, what, if anything, can librarians do about their role within the education system to disrupt the commodification of education? The proposal is offered that librarians and artworks have more in common than seems possible. This idea is explained by briefly introducing artwork as a monad, concluding that art and perhaps librarians reflect the society that created them but cannot change it. Nevertheless, the very existence of art reflects the possibilities of such change, and maybe this is its role.