Chance encounters, some several years apart, form the basis of this article between 2 librarians and an artist, all 3 considering the process of decolonizing libraries within the wider context of colonial legacies in the societies in which they were born and in which they now live. The librarians Regina Vogel and Erica Foden-Lenahan have been friends and colleagues for many years, and their personal conversations over the years have often involved discussions of equality and injustice. The overlap in their professional interests led to this article proposal. A serendipitous meeting between Vogel and decolonial artist and curator Nistiman Erdede at an event2 organized by Abendschule Import in co-operation with the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and later when he visited the Kunsthalle Basel where Vogel is the librarian, changed the original direction of the article, but presented an opportunity for a 3-way discussion of decolonization in the context of a Swiss and a German art library and a refugee artist's experience. The Covid-19 border and workplace lockdowns necessitated that some of these encounters happened virtually.

The second wave of feminism saw a surge in women's publishing that resulted in a women-controlled communications infrastructure within feminist periodicals. As a result of women actively contributing to the ‘letters to the editor’ pages, second wave periodicals offer rich source material for tracing the development of feminist theory. Indicative of an invested and participatory counterpublic of readers, second wave periodicals also reveal the internal disagreements and debates which feminists were grappling with during the 1970s and 1980s. Spare rib, Trouble & strife, Revolutionary/radical feminist newsletter and Outwrite were feminist periodicals that all published coverage of the 1982 Lebanese war, and discussed the subsequent implications of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Conflict over how correctly to cover the disagreements, both editorially and ideologically, dominated the correspondence pages of these periodicals. However, mediating conflict was uniquely suited to the medium of a periodical, as it allowed for less outspoken women to see themselves as contributors and add to a plurality of opinion. The visual mapping of these debates by means of Social Network Analysis highlights how the circulation of feminist periodicals enabled communication in the form of a webbed network of debate. The periodical format, and in particular the letters pages, offered a much-needed forum for criticism and disagreement to play out, and in turn the advancement of feminist discourse. As historical source material, they tell the story of a complex and diverse movement, unsettling the notion of a neat chronology of distinct decades of feminist history.

Advocating for art disciplinary methodologies in collaborations with digital collections librarians, especially in academic libraries, is a vital skill. While art librarians have refined and transformed their relationship to art disciplines in practice and through professional organizations like ARLIS, communicating the importance of art methodologies to their generalist colleagues in digital collections can be challenging. This disciplinary disconnect can result in collaborations and digital projects that fail to meet the needs of the art community because they do not include the necessary information used by art researchers and, thus, thwart discoverability. However, successful collaborations are possible with compromise and negotiation. The Shields Trade Card Collection, housed at Walter Havighurst Special Collections and University Archives at Miami University, serves as a case study, demonstrating both the need for art librarians to advocate for art specific methodologies throughout the lifecycle of a digital collections project while identifying specific areas of compromise key to sustaining future collaborations.

The Courtauld Institute of Art is two years into a digitisation project of the Witt and Conway photograph archives (in addition to other, smaller collections) – a massive project that will make accessible over three million images of works of art from these internationally important photo collections. This article looks closely at the digitisation project and in particular, at the small army of volunteers assembled to carry out the digitisation and how this element of public engagement is essential to the success of the project.

Digital technologies are affecting all aspects of modern life, with both art and libraries becoming more digital. This presents new opportunities for engagement, but also creates significant challenges to the long term future of our collections, due to the rapid changes in technology and the threat of digital obsolescence.

This article will reflect on the ongoing work at the University of the Arts London (UAL) to preserve and provide access to the university's growing digital collections. Digital preservation is an emerging area of practice. What progress have we made so far and what does the future hold for our digital collections?

Librarians and graphic designers have a lot in common. Both are information professionals that offer means or cues to help users navigate, understand and solve a problem within a certain space. Without the librarian, the library space itself becomes the interface where users are offered signage to problem-solve intuitively. Because of this, effective communication via signage and wayfinding becomes imperative to the library user experience. By empathizing with our patrons and clearly articulating what the problem is, it is possible to anticipate user needs, address them by utilizing the design-thinking process, and prototype solutions like a graphic designer. However, this is not a permanent, one-time process, and it will need to be repeated whenever the needs of the patrons evolve and new problems emerge.