The second edition of The handbook of art and design librarianship (The handbook) has been eagerly awaited and its publication was accompanied by a flurry of publicity in the art library world. Although the first edition was published fewer than 10 years ago, such is the pace of change in the profession that existing chapters have been revised completely and there are a number of new chapters to reflect new areas of emphasis within the library profession.
The organization of The handbook highlights how librarianship has developed in the past 20 years, with 6 over-arching sections that, in general, mirror how libraries themselves tend to be structured (collection management, general management, teaching and learning, etc) and the areas of responsibility that fall under each. The structure familiar to readers from their workplaces is logical to follow. There is a helpful index, with a mix of standards names, concepts and materials terminology. With over 25 chapters, it is impossible to review or discuss each one. The following are a subjective selection tailored towards the reviewer's own areas of expertise, as well as knowledge and experience gaps.
The first section entitled “Roles and responsibilities” includes Paul Glassman's very useful summary of current governance and administrative practice. This management overview is a concise introduction and template for the strategic planning process – revision for those who have not studied for awhile or who need to assert some control over the competing priorities in their current positions. The whole section reviews trends and changing roles in the sector and provides introductions to accreditation processes and design thinking, which may have long traditions but are fairly recently applied to art and design libraries.
Materials and collection management, part 2, is the area in which many of us feel most comfortable and the focus, on the whole, is two-fold: special collections and digitization. It is in these areas where we so often see what makes an art library different from other types of library. Molly Schoen gives a concise introduction to digitization best practice, while Greta Bahnemann and Jeannine Keefer elaborate on the decision-making involved in developing digital collections. If ever in the position to embark on a digitization project, these together provide excellent initial guidance and their bibliographies indicate further reading and links.
University of the Arts London librarians Jess Crilly, Gustavo Grandal Montero and Sarah Mahurter detail all aspects of collection management of special collections materials from policy, acquisition, and preservation to facilitating access and exploiting collections for teaching. They include an extensive list of resources. This would serve as an excellent introduction to special collections management for someone new to the area, as well as to more experienced special collections librarians seeking to tighten up their policies or to implement a preservation plan and who can home in to particular sub-sections.
A special mention in this section goes to Alyssa Carver, for her helpful chapter on archival description, discussing how it differs from bibliographic description and including further resources and current standards.
Michael Wirtz's chapter ‘Embedded in their world’ in the Teaching and learning section discusses the design research process and how it differs from traditional research, while Alexander Watkins provides a step-by-step guide through the theory behind the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and its application to teaching fine art and art history students. Sandra Ludig Brooke explores the advantages of handling workshops to teach art history concepts. The reviewer found the ‘Teaching and learning section’ most helpful overall and will share it with a lecturer, in order to better collaborate and incorporate their class time in the library more effectively. There are a number of useful approaches in the section that librarians can integrate into their own practice, such as Catherine Haras's guidance for designing a research assignment for art history students, even if they lack a teaching suite or work in a more traditional institution where faculty do not work as closely with library staff.
Knowledge creation builds on previous sections and represents one of the most significant shifts in the profession in the last few years – demonstrating evidence of library input into creative and research outputs. Interesting projects are presented, but these chapters, perhaps, would sit better as case-study articles in a journal, rather than in a handbook because it is difficult to identify generalities due to a lack of commonality in purpose, framework, or outcome.
The crisis in scholarly publishing and the issues affecting libraries as publishing models move to electronic journals are documented in the chapter ‘Beyond the monograph? Transformations in scholarly communication and their impact on art librarianship’. Some issues are common to all types of library others affect arts and humanities libraries disproportionately and will be familiar to most librarians. The chapter includes an excellent list of scholarly communication resources for art librarians, most of which focus on open access publishing and are concentrated in the English-speaking world. The bias against the current publishing models felt by academic authors and subscribing libraries is strongly evident in the chapter. What was largely missing was the perspective of the professional library bodies/learned societies that are sustained by the income from their small-run, niche market journal subscriptions, like the Art libraries journal, or from arts and humanities journals published in languages other than English. There are even more aspects to this discussion than were presented in the chapter, interesting and useful though it is.
The appendix is a series of library profiles organized under the headings of art and design school libraries, academic branch libraries, academic department-based libraries, and main academic libraries supporting art and design curricula. Missing are art libraries that lie outside of an academic institution, such as museum or public libraries. This is one of the weaknesses of The handbook – it touches only briefly on museum collections where the museum is affiliated with an academic institution and one author comes from a public library. The patrons served, issues faced by, and organizational structures of these absent libraries can be quite different to those of an academic institution. Although its foreword is clear The handbook is for and about academic libraries, neither the title nor the back cover description give any indication that art museum libraries and public libraries with significant art subject-specific collections are not considered. It may have been felt neither is a large enough constituency, and yet it may well be employees in those types of art libraries that are in most need of the advice to be found in such a handbook.
However, back to the library profiles which are all North American institutions, with the exception of the Yeshiva University in Israel, the University of the Arts London, and Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar (with an institutional structure based on American universities), and are drawn from the contributors' libraries. The chapter ‘…describes the diversity of potential opportunities for art and design librarianship in higher education.’Footnote 1 To an aspiring art librarian from, say mainland Europe, Australasia or Asia, there is very little diversity demonstrated in these institutions.
The preface asserts the purpose of The handbook is to ‘present a selection of essays that take a careful look into the world of academic art and design libraries, whether they are part of universities or support independent art and design schools.’Footnote 2 To that extent, it is a careful look indeed, it is unfortunate though that it restricts itself to art libraries in academic institutions and almost exclusively in the English-speaking world.
A very small sample at a recent training event for RDA in Germany revealed that none of the museum or academic libraries had acquired The handbook. The profession, as a whole, is not as multi-lingual as we might believe. But it is also because academic institutions, research institutes, and museums and their libraries within Europe are organized and funded differently than their North American counterparts and this can lead to different methods and priorities. There are many more one or two-person libraries in Europe, even in the academic sector, so reading about a team of teaching and learning librarians is difficult to translate into one's own situation. The prevalence of online journal usage is much lower in some countries, once again language plays a role here as only the most scholarly journals in foreign languages are indexed so finding articles is difficult, as does cost. Many small art libraries in Germany, for example, continue to purchase journals through local bookshops and books are rarely acquired from a large distributor who undertakes all the book-processing functions. Also there are many co-operative digitization projects and resources, like Europeana, that are fostered and promoted by the structures for funding within Europe. In the number of chapters on digitization, it would have been nice to see this technical and project management expertise represented.
The above are just a few of the differences one might encounter in a European library. This handbook of art and design librarianship is useful – it gathers together information about the profession as practised in academic institutions in the UK and North America – and contains some helpful advice on general principles of art library management. In the expectation of reading an overview of best practice in the profession, as the title suggests, the focus on North American and, to a lesser extent, UK academic library structures somehow limits the book. Art itself is global and the librarianship that supports it should be as well. The absence in such a handbook of art and design librarianship as practised in the wider world is disappointing and can create the impression that North American and UK academic libraries represent the best of best practice, whereas librarians in other countries and in different types of art library also are creating pragmatic best practice on a daily basis. It would be more helpful as a handbook to see some of their contributions that reflect the art library profession as it is developing in all its guises.
