ARLIS/NA 46th Annual Conference

This session explores value in distinctive, special, and archival collections. Speakers discuss building, understanding, or providing access to resources, recent interventions, and perceptions of collection value. Price will share her experience of initiating a house catalog collection at the Art, Architecture, & Engineering Library at the University of Michigan with an emphasis on crafting a collection development policy, the goal of which is to provide valuable and relevant regional content to scholars. Jones describes undertaking archival provenance research at the University of Pittsburgh’s Frick Fine Arts Library to create a workable and accessible dataset of the founding library collection that enables access, assessment and promotes teaching and learning. Aberle discusses creating a dataset for the University of Texas at Austin’s Architecture & Planning Library Special Collections to apply DH methodologies to understand collection development and description. Gottlieb-Miller presents a case study on making the invisible visible, arguing for ways to reinvent what stewardship looks like for historically marginalized collections in her work with the Kokomo Collection of Black Americana in the Menil Collection Library. González Palacios explores how the redesign of the Canadian Centre for Architecture website aims to blur the line between what the CCA produces and collects and how integrating multiple collections poses challenges and opportunities for discovery and access.

Presentations:
Rebecca Price, “Building a Collection from the Ground Up”
Kiana Jones, “The Pedagogical Value of Provenance Research in Rare Book Collections and ‘Heritage Libraries’: Re-discovering the First Collection at the Frick Fine Arts Library, University of Pittsburgh”
Jessica Aberle, “Turning the Catalog into Data at the Architecture and Planning Library, University of Texas at Austin”
Lauren Gottlieb-Miller, “Access and Stewardship: “Black Americana” in the Menil Collection Library”
Mar González Palacios, “Thinking outside the search box: finding new possibilities for discovery and access at the Canadian Centre for Architecture”