My artistic practice has always drawn heavily from archival research and has used strategies of reproduction to underscore the archive as a living object. By disrupting the perceived fixity of the archive and recovering its heterogeneity my work reveals hierarchies of power that play out across class, gender, sexuality, caste, race, and geography.

‘It all started with us being fed up of hearing Marshall McLuhan's name once too often in our Visual Communication MA at the Royal College of Art. We wish we could have kept a tally of how many times his name came up.’1 This is how our book Not a Reference Yet starts. In this text we are going back to the beginning of our venture and what got us started. Simply put, we noticed a missing gap in the references we were looking for. Digging a little deeper, we started to see the mechanisms in place that stop a reference from being found or even to exist in the first place. We are both graphic designers and, in this research, we focus on our own industry, however, this problem seems to be fairly universal and applies to many industries – especially those in which representation plays a big role.

Although reading lists are an important part of curricula and play an essential role in decolonizing education, the work to diversify them can often neglect intersectional approaches that consider both racialized and gendered dimensions of knowledge construction. The consequence can be an additive approach in which black authors and authors of colour are included to diversify reading lists, reproducing racist and sexist biases. This paper examines how reading lists are constructed in curricula and presents an alternative decolonial feminist approach to creating a reading list in fashion design. The value of decolonial feminism lies in addressing the gaps in thinking by using a racialized and gendered framework. The Decolonizing the Curriculum Toolkit project at Westminster University, UK is introduced to which the author contributed a Decolonising Fashion Design Reading List, as an example of counter-hegemonic curricula which aimed to reveal the unequal power dynamics that support colonial logics in fashion design education. Exposing hegemonic distinctions in fashion that represent Western fashion as modern and non-Western fashion as traditional can then allow marginalized and excluded fashion narratives to become centred. Such an approach can then provide a key tool towards building a more pluralised and de-hierarchised set of fashion design resources.

Firstly, it is an honour to be asked to contribute to this anniversary issue. AKMB is celebrating 25 years as an organization supporting and representing art and museum librarians and libraries (1). ARLIS/UK & Ireland celebrated 50 years in 2019 and the Art Libraries Journal (ALJ) celebrated 40 years in 2016, so I have spent a lot of my 7 years as editor of the ALJ reflecting on how far we have come. The past couple of generations have overseen tremendous achievements in the profession worldwide and these milestones are an opportunity to reflect on those changes and to look forward. This is a personal perspective and is intended to be (often) light-hearted, it also is limited to what I have observed within the limitations of having attained my education outside of Germany and of operating in a second language environment.

Gustavo Grandal Montero (ALJ): The three of you founded Fehras Publishing Practices in 2015 in Berlin and since then have been working together in a series of long-term art projects focused on archives and publishing. Collectives, collaboration and networks are central to your practice, how much is this connected to an expanded understanding of publishing as a quintessentially collaborative cultural activity?

This article describes some important steps within the history of the journal AKMB-news, published in cooperation with the board of the AKMB, and dedicated to subjects of the day-to-day work: information about the arts, museums and libraries. The author is founding member of the AKMB and a member of its editorial board since 1995.

In 2018, the UNESCO Office to the Gulf States and Yemen and its partner, Qatar National Library, launched a project aiming at supporting the preservation of documentary heritage in the Arab region. The Arab region is home to a unique and rich documentary heritage subject to risk due to natural decay, conflicts and instability. To support its preservation, this project had for objective to better understand the needs and challenges faced by documentary heritage institutions in the region though a mapping exercise and the dissemination of a survey.

This article outlines the key outcomes of the survey including the situation of documentary heritage at the regional and national level, a brief review of legal frameworks protecting documentary heritage, the main obstacles and threats to documentary heritage preservation and the needs expressed by conservation practitioners in terms of capacity-building, professional development, infrastructure and support in additional areas such as policy and advocacy.

More than 25 years after the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Kunst- und Museumsbibliotheken (AKMB) was founded – an eternity in the digital age – libraries and museums as institutions of public life are more than ever subject to fundamental transformation.

The AKMB has set itself the task of offering its affiliated institutions a platform for knowledge exchange and networking. Questions about standardization in librarianship, technical equipment, formal and subject indexing as well as possibilities of exchange and support in answering these questions are in focus. It is not - in the classic sense of a library - a physical place. Nevertheless, it forms simultaneously the basis and the opportunity for art and museum libraries to orient themselves to a digital future. In this regard, it also deals itself with structural changes and its challenges.

At a time when space in any academic library is at a premium, when we sometimes need to argue for shelf space rather than computers and group work pods, the University of Sydney Library has decided not only to keep and maintain its nineteenth century printing press, but to feature it through a printer in residence program.

Now in its third year, the program brings together a printmaker and a letterpress for eight weeks during semester. The intent is to engage with the library and its users, to bring the print workshop to life, to draw inspiration from the library's collection and to create a publication for the Artists’ Book Collection within Rare Books & Special Collections.

In an era of instant layout, digital word processing and electronic publishing what does the slow and laborious process of letterpress printing bring to a twenty-first century academic library? This residency demonstrates that understanding the process of making a publication can be just as vital and alive as the content of that publication - one letter at a time.

Some years ago, in a moment of transition in leadership for a major special collections library, I was part of an advisory group where the prevailing opinion was that a faculty member with passionate interests in the research focus of the institution could successfully occupy the position of head librarian. We did not need someone with an MLIS degree, a PhD in a field related to the collections areas would do fine.

This paper describes and evaluates research undertaken by the author at the State Library of Queensland, in the collection, cataloguing, and presentation of audiovisual materials—specifically, sound materials beyond oral history and performance. It suggests that strategies drawn from transcription can make the sounds of the past more evident in digitised catalogues, and thus can make those sounds themselves more accessible to the public. In doing so it offers a different affordance of the archive to public experience: not just information about the past, but the affective impact of the past.

Writers, artists and academics have long used primary source material to inspire creative projects or uncover new evidence. Over time, different approaches have been taken to investigate and interpret one particular artist's collection, the Daphne Mayo Papers (UQFL119) at the Fryer Library, University of Queensland.1 Mapping the shift in research approaches, using text and image as well as more speculative modes of working, this article provides a case study into the past, present and future adaptation of the Daphne Mayo Papers as physical modes converge with digital ones.