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.

How are sketchbooks collected, organized, indexed and made accessible in the UK's memory institutions? My research is outlined, describing how, through interviews and a questionnaire sent to sketchbook-holding institutions, they are acquired, who they are accessed by, problems faced by those accessing them, the extent to which sketchbooks can be handled and examined physically, and the benefits and consequences of digitization and online access of sketchbooks. Finally, institutions offer ideas on how access to sketchbooks can be improved.

The Australian National Botanic Gardens plays an important role in the study and promotion of Australia's diverse range of unique plants through its living collection, scientific research activities and also through the art collection held in the institution's Library and Archives. Australia's history of formal botanical illustration began with the early voyages of discovery with its popularity then declining until the modern day revival in botanical art. The Australian National Botanic Gardens Library and Archives art collection holds works from the Endeavour voyage through to the more contemporary artists of Celia Rosser, Collin Woolcock, Gillian Scott and Aboriginal artists including Teresa Purla McKeeman as well as photographs and outdoor installations.

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.

After six years of formal art training in Europe, I returned home in the late 1960s very much influenced by modern western art and its secular utopian worldview. However, when viewed from a religious perspective, modern art evidenced the process of secularization and humanization. Local scholars lamented such art could led to the gradual loss of the nation's tradition which is steeped in spirituality. To them, Western-trained Malaysian artists’ works are a reflection of a captive mentality glorifying art that is spiritually debilitating, sociologically alienating and psychologically corrupting. Concerned with such phenomenon in Malaysia's post-Independence period, the government convened the National Cultural Congress (1971), to harness the cultural power in fostering unity in her multicultural society. Among the three resolutions recommended, one was Islam, as Malaysia's official religion, it would play a vital role in the formulation of a national cultural identity. In view of this historic event, I made a u-turn denouncing modern art, ingrained in me for decades, and made Islam as the raison d‘être of my art by responding to the challenges of NCC. This paper therefore, will extrapolate my five-decade artistic trajectory from Western-centric art period to Malay-Islamic art from 1970s -2018.

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.

An internationally recognized presence in the documentation of Indic and South East Asian art and architecture, the Center for Art and Archaeology (CA&A) of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) conducted a documentation project in 2007 that explored an interesting range of built heritage arrayed along a 16th-century highway, the Agra – Lahore route, laid by the Mughal rulers of India. The stretch of the Agra – Lahore highway this project traced, crossed two north Indian states of independent India – Haryana and Punjab, and documented built heritage that survives on that road. The documentation revealed edifices unique to a travel environment including Caravansarai (rest house), Kos-Minars (distance markers), bridges, stepped-wells and Bagh (pleasure gardens) built under the patronage of Mughal elites. The project emphasized the importance of identifying the strands of cultural heritage and the processes of documenting them. A major aim of such documentation was to aid preservation of the monuments themselves by providing critical information for future decisions.

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.

Collection development at Monash University Library aims to fulfil the research and curriculum needs of university staff and students. To support the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), collection development operates as a collaboration between academic faculty and the Subject Librarian. In order to further develop this collaboration and to encourage the selection and use of design resources by authors from diverse backgrounds, design lecturers and library staff have initiated The Equity Collection project. The aim of the project is to investigate the diversity of the collection in its current state and to improve its ability to reflect and extend the multicultural nature of the university community. The project includes a campaign to collect and promote books from the design world authored by under-represented groups, including Indigenous Australians, people of colour, and female and non-binary authors. This project is unique in its utilisation of the expertise of the design faculty who have extensive knowledge of authors, small publishers and less widely distributed publications.

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.

This article explores issues of developing individual and collective professional identities within art librarianship, with an emphasis on art librarians’ relationship to art and art-making. By having more honest conversations around what art does, what artists do and how they function in society, we can challenge deeply held assumptions about art librarianship; in particular, that our work is somehow removed from the political and social contexts in which we perform it. Through critical interventions within our profession we can develop a better understanding and definition of our relationship to art and artists in order to situate ourselves within current art practices. We can then build impactful relationships and social justice-oriented solidarity with creative practitioners and artists who are actively challenging structural oppression and promoting social justice through their work.

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?’

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.

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.