This session explores the practices and challenges in collection development through three diverse perspectives, each of which aims to highlight an under-supported aspect of art library collections. It addresses the often-overlooked narratives within institutional records, particularly the marginalization of labor and craft history in museum archives. It also examines the delicate balance in weeding specialized art and design collections, highlighting the need for both quantitative and qualitative criteria in decision-making. Finally, the session investigates how biases in art criticism—particularly concerning race and gender—are reflected in the collections we maintain, urging librarians to consider how external cultural dynamics shape the materials we collect and preserve. Together, these papers offer critical insights into how we document, curate, and critique our collections.
Craft in the Filing Cabinet: Documenting the History of Craft Workers, Objects, and Spaces in Institutional Records Tough - Jenna StoutA 2024 review of artists’ files in this art museum library revealed an overall lack of staff artist representation. More specifically, the files did not reflect the numerous craft workers employed by the institution since its founding. With roots in the late nineteenth century, this museum offered night classes in bookbinding, drafting, and other technical arts for day laborers. Craft workers, in the form of carpenters, plasterers, and house painters, helped build the institution from the ground-up. From WPA technical drawings to artist file drawers by the Crafts Division, hand-built slide carrying cases, and the award-winning period room restoration project of the 1980s, the institutional records reveal a rich history of on-site craft labor that is embedded in the galleries and other spaces. While reports of craft workers and objects pop up in the archives, a delineation between work product and art object is reverberated in institutional records.
Through case studies of museum objects and spaces, Stout will discuss how administrative files can illuminate craft history. Legacy filing systems, retention schedules, and cataloging practices pose barriers to the discoverability of institutional craft stories. In reviewing and redescribing files, there is an opportunity to shed light on the hidden labor of craft workers that might not be visible in top-level staff directories and archived record container lists.
A Tough Row to Hoe: Weeding an Art & Design Collection - Amy LazetWhile most recommendations for weeding include circulation statistics and age of the resource, what do librarians do when books have low circulation statistics or when age should not be a factor in the weeding process?
Many of the seminal texts on weeding focus on public libraries while the literature for academic libraries tends to emphasize quantitative criteria as well as encouraging a reliance on interlibrary loans and ebooks. Art and design, however, are more print preferred than other disciplines and often contain books that are difficult to replace.
In 2021, the author was tasked with evaluating the entire print book collection, a task that had not happened in full for at least 20 years. This paper makes available the set of criteria developed for this weeding project, including qualitative criteria and a sliding scale for quantitative criteria. This information will be contextualized with findings from a survey of deaccessioning criteria from other art and design collections.
Attendees will gain an overview of current deaccessioning practices at multiple art and design libraries, including the frequency of weeding projects. Attendees will also come away with the concrete list of discipline-specific weeding criteria developed by the author. Although these guidelines were written for an academic art and design library specifically, the information can be extrapolated to academic and research libraries more broadly.
Criticizing Art Criticism - Emilee MathewsThis paper investigates how racism and sexism interoperate in the reflection of contemporary art through gallery shows and exhibition reviews. In order to do so, I gathered a set of 97 exhibition reviews covering the 2016/2017 season from well known publications such as Artforum, New York Times, Brooklyn Rail and more.
In this paper I build on previous quantitative research tracing proportionality by qualitatively analyzing not only which artists were covered, but also how. I analyze demographic biases (are artists of color more favorably reviewed than white artists?) as well as art historical trends (are painters better received than sculptors? Which galleries tend to have the most favorable coverage?). I uncover author affiliations and compare articles they've written against others in the dataset. I then contextualize these reviews and the dispositions they reflect in art criticism literature from the stalwart Sylvan Barnett to the intrepid Aruna D'Souza and meta publications like "the Bad Review List" from 4Columns. I look additionally at the role criticism and reviews play more broadly in contemporary society. From food to film, books to bed and breakfasts, whose judgments we seek and taste we emulate has changed significantly due to sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon and Yelp. By analyzing this article dataset, we can explore dynamics of how the publications we collect in the library reflect broader cultural ecologies.
