In 2009, I was two years into my tenure as a museum employee, managing a collection of small exhibition brochures, pamphlets and gallery announcements at the National Gallery of Art Library. That summer, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith reported on a phenomenon I had also observed in my capacity as Reference Librarian for Vertical Files: the decline of the printed gallery post card. Smith's ArtsBeat blog post, ‘Gallery Card as Relic,’ is a breezy elegy surveying recent “final notice” cards mailed from commercial galleries that were “going green” by eliminating paper mailings. I, however, was feeling less light-hearted about the demise of what Smith describes as a “useful bit of art-world indicator…[and] an indispensable constant creatively deployed by artists, avidly cherished by the ephemera-obsessed and devotedly archived by museums.”Footnote ¹

As an “ephemera-obsessed” artists files librarian, the anxiety welled up. Not only was my position imminently irrelevant, but I had missed the party. They heyday of printed art gallery ephemera was over. Yet while my dismissal seems less and less likely, anxiety continues to plague me through my daily interactions with the collection, a feeling that has recently come into the vernacular – FOMO: the fear of missing out. Often a condition of overexposure to the non-stop barrage of social media, FOMO is also rampant among librarians who daily encounter invitations, VIP passes, exhibition checklists, pamphlets and other paper detritus that comprise artists files. There is the feeling of having just missed an exhibition advertised on an announcement that crossed your desk months after the show closed. More often, it is the feeling of being not just a few weeks or months late, but many decades late for the gallery opening, the performance or happening. A gilded ticket, with the attendees name carefully handwritten in delicate script, allows entry to the 1934 Venice Biennale. A poster inviting participants to Alan Kaprow's happening, Overtime (a happening for Walter de Maria), asks folks to show up at the Main Building Auditorium, The State University of New York at New Paltz, on April 16^th 1968 at 8 p.m. Wouldn't that have been great?

More benevolent, perhaps, is the fear the librarian has for the researcher missing out. A commercial gallery takes down a webpage for an exhibition that has just closed. A postcard is dropped in an artist's file with minimal description and few opportunities for discovery. A curatorial assistant fails to consult her museum's artists files, and overlooks a checklist integral to her provenance research. Librarians across ARLIS/NA and specifically the Artists Files Special Interest Group (SIG) work to flush out these anxieties and imagine solutions to the unique challenges that afflict ephemera collections. The potential loss of valuable information in print and digital form, as well as lack of access and discovery of both born-digital and print ephemera is of special concern to the SIG specifically and art librarianship more generally.Footnote ²

Researchers rely on hard work, a helpful librarian or serendipity to find the slip of paper or nugget of information they seek. Despite best efforts, however, researchers miss out on valuable ephemera because artists files collections are difficult to find. The Artists Files SIG is interested in the preservation, promotion and accessibility of artists files materials. Since many of these collections are uncataloged, the Artists Files SIG has collaborated on a number of resources to increase the discovery of artists files and establish standards for their maintenance. The scale of collections, their scope and tools for their discovery vary from institution to institution. Some institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art LibraryFootnote ³ and the Museum of Modern Art LibraryFootnote ⁴, create file level records for their collections available through local OPACs or OCLC WorldCat. Others, such as the Smithsonian LibrariesFootnote ⁵ and Amon Carter Museum LibraryFootnote ⁶ create searchable artist name indexes of their files. In an effort to collate collections and standardize policies, the Artists Files SIG created a directory of artists files and best practices documentation – Artist files revealed. Established in 2007 this suite of resources includes an online directory of artists files that serves as a centralized repository for cultural institutions to promote their collections. Artist files revealed also included documentation and resources for maintaining and providing access to ephemera collections. These resources are currently being migrated to our SIG's website at artistfiles.arlisna.org. Collection-level metadata found through Artist files revealed and file-level metadata found through a Google search or a library's OPAC help scholars find collections. Effectively, metadata on artists files are breadcrumbs for researchers to follow to physical collections.

Fig. 1.

Cover, Artist Files Revealed: Documentation and Access. ARLIS/NA, 2010

Digitized ephemera collections ensure researchers don't miss out on material buried in artists files, especially if these collections are made freely available on the internet. Digital surrogates of ephemera, however, are often scattered across the internet by various entities and in various contexts – a library's digital repository, of course, but often a book dealer advertising a rare gallery announcement for sale, a museum library blog post, an online feature accompanying a physical exhibition. These resources often float around on the internet like space junk, with poor metadata and tools to enable their discovery. Hurdles such as copyright and funding impede the creation of organized, consistently maintained, coherent, digitized collections of artist ephemera. In the past years, however, organizations have highlighted the necessity of making ephemera available online and advocated for a broader application of fair use. The 2007 OCLC report, Shifting gears: gearing up to get into the flow advocates for programmatic, large-scale digitization of special collections such as artists files. Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner argue that, ‘special collections are stuck in an eddy, while the mass of digitized books drift by in the current of the mainstream. We need to jump into the flow or risk being left high and dry.’Footnote ⁷ The recent College Art Association Code of best practices for fair use in the visual arts also addresses special collections, encouraging memory institutions to provide digital access to their collections with appropriate metadata.Footnote ⁸ Hopefully, this will motivate librarians to enhance access to artists files collections through digitization.

While physical ephemera in artists files may be difficult to find, it is not lost forever. The fear of missing out on their digital equivalents, however, is more vexing. Emails, tweets and virtual tours replace the gallery postcard, press release and installation shots. Artist's bios and C.V.'s are digitally created and uploaded directly to a gallery's website, without ever existing in print. Even if a commercial gallery is savvy with the preservation of their digital assets, what assurances do we have that this information will be available to future researchers – a responsibility that traditionally falls to libraries and archives? Furthermore, how will this born digital ephemera function alongside their print counterparts in the art research landscape? The Artists Files SIG confronts these questions in our most recent initiative, a web archiving pilot project of gallery websites and other born-digital artist information. Working with Archive-It, a web archiving service, the Artists Files SIG experiments with archiving gallery websites, generating metadata, and developing inter-institutional workflows. Our project also allows us to observe the changes happening on the web and commiserate about their effects on art historical research.Footnote ⁹ The New York Art Resources Consortium,Footnote ¹⁰ the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,Footnote ¹¹ and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)Footnote ¹² have all contributed pioneering efforts to collecting information about contemporary artists found on the web. As artist ephemera often reveal their importance only after many decades, it will be interesting to see how these web archives reveal their value, as well. Fifty years from now, the researcher of an artist active in 2016 may not need to make a special trip to consult a physical artist's file in NMWA's Archives of Women Artists, but rather poke around in digital collections such as the museum's Archive-It collection, Contemporary women artists on the web.

While it is undoubtedly the librarian's role to organize and provide access to print and botn digital ephemera, the librarian must also provide context to her collections, as well, so that art researchers don't miss out on the added meaning that ephemera add to understanding the history of art. The “art world indicators” found in artists files provide insight into material culture, design trends, artistic movements and ideologies of the time. There are many opportunities for librarians to activate their collections through exhibitions, publications and digital resources. In 1995, Clive Phillpot writes in his essay ‘Flies in the files’, ‘it behooves us to take steps to publicize these obscure resources that give our collections extra distinction and value for researchers.’Footnote ¹³ Jacqueline Cooke eloquently encourages librarians to re-contextualize artists files material ‘by drawing out the relationships that ephemera have to other ephemera, or to other materials, or to art practices and ideas, that will help to draw out their potential as sources.’Footnote ¹⁴ The Museum of Modern Art's Please come to the show Footnote ¹⁵ and California College of Arts and Crafts' Extra Art Footnote ¹⁶ are excellent examples of exhibitions of ephemera. I personally get a thrill to see posters and announcements printed in exhibition catalogs such as the postcard for Elaine Sturtevant's The store of Claes Oldenburg in the catalog for her show Double trouble.Footnote ¹⁷ It is also especially meaningful to see ephemera exhibited alongside artworks in a gallery setting, such as in the recent Roberto Matta show at Pace Gallery in New York, which features a vitrine with announcements of Matta exhibitions from the 50s and 60s. Taking ephemera out of the files and into the gallery transforms the humble postcard from art historical junk mail to a sort of companion piece that fosters greater understanding of an artwork, movement or concept.

Fig. 2.

ARLIS/NA, Artist Files SIG Contemporary Art Galleries https://archive-it.org/collections/3538 (detail)]

While the librarian's fear of missing out is rational and well-founded, the more interactions she has with artists files and the ephemera they contain, the more she realizes that she hasn't missed out at all. Groups such as the Artists Files SIG, as well as other libraries and librarians, create opportunities through discovery tools, digital resources and exhibitions for scholars and art lovers to understand the true potential of artist ephemera. Once the material is exposed, scholars are free to observe their distinctive power. The fonts, graphic design and language of Alan Kaprow's “creatively deployed” announcement for his happening, Overtime, (a happening for Walter de Maria), might affect mere nostalgia, operating as a “relic” of the past. The address label directed to a former well-beloved curator, the postmark from Glen Head, New York and the act of gently unfolding the poster, however, unite us through time in the quotidian action of opening the mail. We have the opportunity to re-experience this moment fifty years later. At their best, ephemera can supply important information that help art historians recreate the past – an artist's birth year, an item on a checklist, an installation shot. At their most transcendent, however, ephemera uniquely communicate across time and space the moment of bemusement, connection or contemplation that epitomize the art lover's experience.