Art Catalogs Unbound:

Overcoming Challenges through Engagement

Stephanie Beene, University of New Mexico USA
Laura Soito, University of New Mexico USA
Laura Kohl, University of New Mexico USA

Abstract—Exhibition catalogs have a long history within arts organizations, libraries, and archives.
Scholars often rely on them for research, but they can also be used for teaching critical information
and visual literacy concepts. Through instruction, cataloging enhancements, open data sharing, and
crowdsourcing initiatives, librarians can link the scholarly and artistic conversations within these
texts to broader discourse, social contexts, collections, and resources. Through various initiatives
and platforms illustrated in this article, communities can contribute to a new type of digital exhi-
bition catalog, one that breaks free from the bound book format and embraces the participatory
nature of the internet.

i n t ro d u c t i o n
Exhibition catalogs are produced by cultural heritage institutions to document and
enhance exhibitions for a range of audiences, both popular and expert. This article
examines their history as a unique format amid the broader curatorial, collection, and
data trends in libraries and museums. Exhibition catalogs also promote critical infor-
mation and visual literacy concepts through an examination of their content, contexts,
and formats. Librarians can embrace critical pedagogies, newer acquisitions models,
and open data to ensure that exhibition catalogs remain relevant, contextualized, and
discoverable.

Stephanie Beene is assistant professor and fine arts librarian for art, architecture and planning, College of University
Libraries and Learning Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico; [email protected]. Laura Soito is
assistant professor and acquisitions and electronic resources coordinator, College of University Libraries and Learning
Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico; [email protected]. Laura Kohl is assistant professor and
principal cataloger, College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New
Mexico; [email protected].

Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, vol. 39 (spring 2020)
0730-7187/2020/3901-0003 $10.00. © 2020 by The Art Libraries Society of North America. All rights reserved.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 25

Published by public, private, and commercial institutions, exhibition catalogs con-

tinue to be a significant form of art documentation.1 Their history can be traced to the
first art collection catalogs published in the seventeenth century and to group and
solo exhibition catalogs in the eighteenth century.2 Exhibition catalogs, similar to col-
lection catalogs, catalogues raisonnés,3 and art ephemera,4 serve as both primary and
secondary sources5 and are often investigated for artist biographies, artwork prove-
nance, exhibition histories, and broader trends in the art and design world. Exhibition
catalogs may include artist and contributor profiles, conservation notes, interviews and
statements, essays by curators and other invited authors, artwork details, provenance
and exhibition histories, bibliographies, and other attributes.6 Serialized catalogs docu-
ment major milestones such as biennials7 or works from auction houses, trade shows,
or galleries.
There are a range of complications to building sustainable, robust collections of
exhibition catalogs, akin to challenges encountered with other evolving forms of art
documentation.8 Even though artists are creating more virtual and augmented real-
ities, video, and digital media, these types of artworks and exhibition histories remain

1. Gustavo Grandal Montero, “Art Documentation: Exhibition Catalogues and Beyond,” in The Handbook of Art and
Design Librarianship, eds. Paul Glassman and Judy Dyki (London, UK: Facet Publishing, 2017), 109; Frederick Cummings,
“The Art Reference Library,” College & Research Libraries 27, no. 3 (1966): 203, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl_27_03_201.
2. Grandal Montero, “Art Documentation: Exhibition Catalogues and Beyond,” 109; João Ribas, “Notes Towards a
History of the Solo Exhibition,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Content, and Enquiry, no. 38 (Spring 2015): 7, https://doi.org/10
.1086/681282.
3. For research on catalogues raisonnés, see Gustavo Grandal Montero, “Editor’s Note to the Special Issue of Art
Libraries Journal: ‘Catalogues Raisonnés, Collection Catalogues and the Future of Artwork Documentation,’” Art
Libraries Journal 40, no. 2 (2015): 7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200000158, as well as numerous articles in this
special issue. For an online search index for print catalogues raisonnés, see The Print Council of America’s “Search Index
to Print Catalogues Raisonnés,” https://printcouncil.org/search/.
4. The seminal piece by Clive Phillpot, “Flies in the Files: Ephemera in the Art Library,” Art Documentation 14,
no. 1 (Spring 1995): 13–14, https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.14.1.27948707 is a great place to start. For a general overview of
art ephemera, see Kent C. Boese, “Art Ephemera: Relics of the Past, or Treasures for Posterity?” Art Documentation 25,
no. 1 (Spring 2006): 34–37, https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.25.1.27949399. For a survey on UK and international printed
exhibition ephemera, see Vicky Falconer, “Printed Exhibition Ephemera: Here to Stay? A Survey of UK and International
Art Galleries and Organisations Undertaken at Chelsea College of Arts Library,” Art Libraries Journal 41, no. 2 (2016):
97–105,https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2016.8. Javier Docampo and Rosario López de Prado authored a piece on museum
libraries managing exhibition ephemera: “Are the Latest Exhibition Ephemera Available? Problems and Solutions
for a Neglected Material in Museum Libraries,” Art Libraries Journal 26, no. 2 (2001): 29–37, https://doi.org/10.1017
/S0307472200012177.
5. Jack Robertson, “The Exhibition Catalogue as a Source of Artists’ Primary Documents,” Art Libraries Journal 14,
no. 2 (1989): 32, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200006210.
6. Grandal Montero, “Art Documentation: Exhibition Catalogues and Beyond,” 109.
7. Gustavo Grandal Montero, “Biennalization? What Biennalization?: The Documentation of Biennials and Other
Recurrent Exhibitions,” Art Libraries Journal 37, no. 1 (2012): 13, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200017296; Ray Anne
Lockard, “Outside the Boundaries: Contemporary Art and Global Biennials,” Art Documentation 32, no. 1 (Spring 2013):
102–11, https://doi.org/10.1086/669992.
8. Patrick Tomlin, “Beyond the Monograph? Transformations in Scholarly Communication and Their Impact on
Art Librarianship,” in Glassman and Dyki, The Handbook of Art and Design Librarianship, 244; Catherine Hammond,
“Escaping the Digital Black Hole: E-Ephemera at Two Auckland Art Libraries,” Art Libraries Journal 41, no. 2 (2016): 108,
https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2016.10; Andreja Velimirović, “Does the Future of the Catalogue Raisonné Lie in the Digital
Technology?” Widewalls, November 10, 2017, https://www.widewalls.ch/catalogue-raisonnee.
26 | A R T D O C U M E N TAT I O N | SPRING 2020 | Vol. 39, No. 1

difficult to document, and digitally preserving these works is an ongoing challenge.9

Few digital exhibition catalogs exist, and those that do are not fully utilizing the advantages
of linked open data, which could better integrate and describe new and digital media.10
Exhibition catalogs that embrace Wikidata,11 a linked open data source with growing
popularity in the library sector, capitalize on the ability of the web to contextualize and
link concepts and objects across time and space. One recent example of a digital exhi-
bition catalog is Go, The Art Institute of Chicago’s collaboration with The Getty Foun-
dation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI).12 While its opening pages are
similar to an e-book, interspersed interactive components distinguish the catalog from
its monographic cousin.
An opportunity exists to break free from the bound book format altogether and
open the content of the exhibition catalog to a wider audience through linking its data
to the broader context of online information. Exhibition catalogs can remain socially rel-
evant, inclusive, and representative of conversations occurring in communities through
ongoing participatory curation and crowdsourcing of information surrounding art-
works, movements, themes, and artists. As data is linked, existing information is enriched;
the possibilities are endless and limited only by imagination. As with the crowdsourc-
ing and decentered events already occurring globally through Wikipedia edit-a-thons,13
opening up library collections and resources to participatory curation and open data-
sharing can inspire new manifestations of exhibition catalogs. Whether through com-
munity programming or instruction, data can be contributed to an enhanced resource
for teaching, learning, and research. Following calls for social justice14 and Wikidata
uses within cultural heritage institutions,15 the authors argue for leveraging crowd-
sourcing and collaborative opportunities afforded by a networked, online environment.

9. Beth Morris, “Aspiring to Greatness with Hindsight and Foresight: Assessing Current Preservation and
Conservation Practices of Art Museum Library Collections,” Art Documentation 38, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 115–117, https://
doi.org/10.1086/703452; International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), “Libraries Are Facing Big Challenges in
Digital Preservation: We Cannot Do It Alone,” Library Policy and Advocacy Blog (blog), November 30, 2017, http://blogs
.ifla.org/lpa/2017/11/30/libraries-are-facing-big-challenges-in-digital-preservation-we-cannot-do-it-alone/; Dianne Van Der
Reyden, “Preservation Responsibilities: Material Care and Materials Science for Paper-Based Research Collections,” MRS
Proceedings 352 (January 1995): 63, https://doi.org/10.1557/PROC-352-63.
10. Jinfang Niu, “Integrated Online Access to Objects and Archives.” Archivaria 86 (Fall 2018): 171–72, https://muse
.jhu.edu/article/711161.
11. Association of Research Libraries, “ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations” (Re-
port), April 18, 2019, 38, https://www.arl.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019.04.18-ARL-white-paper-on-Wikidata.pdf;
Stacy Allison-Cassin and Dan Scott, “Wikidata: A Platform for Your Library’s Linked Open Data,” Code4Lib Journal,
no. 40 (2018), https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/13424; Tamara Rhodes, “A Living, Breathing Revolution: How Libraries
Can Use ‘Living Archives’ to Support, Engage, and Document Social Movements,” IFLA Journal 40, no. 1 (March 2014):
7–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035214526536.
12. A. Robin Hoffman, Kate Nesin, and Jill Bugajski, Go (The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty Foundation
Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, 2017), https://publications.artic.edu/modernseries2/reader/go.
13. Art 1 Feminism, https://www.artandfeminism.org.
14. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of Libraries” (Preliminary
Report), 2016, https://future-of-libraries.mit.edu/sites/default/files/FutureLibraries-PrelimReport-Final.pdf; Amanda
Meeks, “Art as the Practice of Freedom: Critical Alliances and Professional Identities within Art Librarianship,” Art
Libraries Journal 44, no. 2 (2019): 62, https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2019.5.
15. ARL, “ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations”; Allison-Cassin and Scott, “Wikidata:
A Platform for Your Library’s Linked Open Data.”
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 27

t h e p o s t - wa r a r t wo r l d : e x h i b i t i o n s
a n d th e i r c at a l o g s
Exhibitions developed during the second half of the nineteenth century through sa-
lons, which visually communicated a spectacular national presence.16 They “allowed
for information to be distributed, visual arguments to be staged, and audiences to be
seduced” and largely served as the testing grounds for modern art up through the first
half of the twentieth century.17 From the mid-1950s forward, trade fairs, corporate
and government exhibits, and commercial advertising gained momentum.18 In keep-
ing with rising socio-economic affluence in a rapidly globalizing post-war society, in-
stitutions competed to produce lavish exhibitions and mega-shows. Post-war caution
gave way to optimistic free-market capitalism and the souvenir market.19 Touring or
temporary exhibits increasingly brought in higher revenue compared with displays
from permanent collections,20 while an “extraordinary proliferation of major recurrent
international exhibitions” over the same period became one of the most valuable ways
in which contemporary artists established their reputations.21
By the 1970s and 1980s, exhibitions had become major commercial endeavors,
with a growing number of blockbuster shows that not only expanded institutions’ vis-
ibility but brought in diverse global audiences. Souvenir exhibition catalogs reached
additional visitors who could not attend the shows in person.22 Banks and private com-
panies began investing in museums and exhibitions, collecting art, and sponsoring
and organizing shows.23
The catalog market developed in parallel with these broader art world trends in
many ways. Because of the expense associated with production costs and the high risk
involved in accruing return on investment, the market rebounded slowly in the post-
war years, largely paralleling the growth and global expansion of exhibitions. By the
1970s, however, publishing houses were responding to a new demand for exhibition
catalogs, with catalogs claiming a place in the art book market and framing themselves
as “expert literature” in direct competition with monographic works.24 At the same
time, exhibition catalogs increasingly were expected to satisfy a lay audience, while also
catering to researchers and experts.25
At the start of the 1990s, this trend toward spectacular exhibitions encountered ob-
stacles, due primarily to financial pressures. In the United States, the so-called “culture

16. Martin Beck, “Defining Exhibition: The Exhibition and the Display,” in Exhibition: Documents of Contemporary Art,
ed. Lucy Steeds (MIT Press, 2014), 28.
17. Beck, “Defining Exhibition,” 28.
18. Beck, “Defining Exhibition,” 29.
19. Lutz Jahre, “Printed Shows: Exhibitions and Their Catalogues during the Last Fifty Years,” Art Libraries Journal
24, no. 2 (1999): 5, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200019404.
20. Jahre, “Printed Shows,” 6.
21. Grandal Montero, “Biennalization? What Biennalization?” 13.
22. Jahre, “Printed Shows,” 6; Sarah Anne Hughes, “Contemporary Publishing by National Museums and Art Galleries
in the UK and Its Future,” Art Libraries Journal 39, no. 3 (2014): 34, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200018423.
23. Jahre, “Printed Shows,” 6.
24. Jahre, “Printed Shows,” 6.
25. Hughes, “Contemporary Publishing by National Museums and Art Galleries in the UK and Its Future,” 34.
28 | A R T D O C U M E N TAT I O N | SPRING 2020 | Vol. 39, No. 1

wars” were waged against art exhibitions, curators, and public funding for museums.
Against this backdrop, acknowledging sponsorships became an important facet of exhi-
bitions, and a dedication page within exhibition catalogs acknowledged such funding.
Exhibition catalogs became part of an economic model for institutions by the end of
the century, when “galleries and museums associated with the arts benefited from
well-established art publishing enterprises.”26
Today, exhibition catalogs allow institutions to promote their brand, share research
endeavors, and generate income, as well as provide both curators and artists with a
venue for scholarly dissemination and prestige.27 The evolution in catalogs and their
varying formats is due partly to conflicts between institutional and commercial im-
peratives, curators’ scholarly objectives, and artists’ creative goals during their pro-
duction.28 Contemporary catalogs elevate shows for art critics looking for metrics of
connoisseurship, where the exhibition catalog as art object is still highly valued, and
the value of the catalog increases exponentially “as soon as one steps out of the Euro-
American art world.”29 Exhibition catalogs encourage introspective, contemplative ex-
periences, whereas exhibitions, especially blockbusters, often do not. Some curators
attempt to create catalogs that enhance an exhibition, instead of recreating it. Sub-
tle messages of brand and authority are carried through catalogs’ design and layout
choices to audiences who may never have a chance to visit the exhibition in person,
reaching far broader audiences than any special programming or event, and enduring
long after deinstallation.30

b u i l d i n g ex h i b i t i o n c ata l o g c o l l e c t i o n s
C O L L E C T I N G T R A D I T I O N A L E X H I B I T I O N C ATA L O G S
Given the numerous ways exhibition catalogs are produced, it is understandable that
many institutions find them challenging to acquire and maintain. Traditional exhibi-
tion catalogs include printed summary catalogs and monographs. Summary catalogs
(exhibition brochures or pamphlets) are produced primarily for documentation, pub-
licity, and archives. They have satisfactory image reproductions and a record of the
objects, venues, people, and events at a show. They are often designed in-house and
given away or mailed out for promotional purposes. Monographic exhibition catalogs,
in contrast, are often produced for larger shows and sold alongside other art and mu-
seum publications. Monographic catalogs can represent exhibitions that tour to multiple

26. Hughes, “Contemporary Publishing by National Museums and Art Galleries in the UK and Its Future,” 34.
27. Hughes, “Contemporary Publishing by National Museums and Art Galleries in the UK and Its Future,” 35; Ribas,
“Notes Towards a History of the Solo Exhibition,” 6.
28. Hughes, “Contemporary Publishing by National Museums and Art Galleries in the UK and Its Future,” 35; David
Broker, “Exhibition Catalogues: A Guide,” in Words, Words, Words, Museum & Gallery Services Queensland (Web),
(Queensland, Australia: Noosa Regional Gallery, 2000), 1, http://www.magsq.com.au/_dbase_upl/Exhibition%20Catalogues
.pdf.
29. Hammad Nasar, quoted in The Transom, March 7, 2007, comment on “Exhibition Catalogs: Time for a Rethink?”
Art World Salon F Opinion Analysis Debate (blog), Marc Spiegler, March 7, 2007, http://www.artworldsalon.com/blog
/2007/03/exhibition-catalogs-time-for-a-serious-rethink/.
30. Hughes, “Contemporary Publishing by National Museums and Art Galleries in the UK and Its Future,” 38.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 29

venues and usually contribute to art and humanities scholarship.31 These catalogs can
have substantial print runs, and multiple institutions often acquire them. International
exhibition catalogs are more likely to contain a large number of scholarly essays,
translations, artist biographies, venue information, bibliographies, indexes, acknowl-
edgments, and glossaries. They are often professionally designed with high-quality
printing and many glossy color images. National exhibition catalogs might also in-
clude all of these items, but they tend to cost less. While they often accompany mu-
seum and gallery exhibitions, they also can be produced for history centers, govern-
ment agencies, state and national parks, libraries, archives, trade shows, auctions,
businesses, and advertising.32 The homemade or self-published catalog is often most
similar to artists’ books and tends to be very limited in print run. Privately produced
by the artist with minimal or no funding, it is the most variable of all the types of
exhibition catalogs and is usually difficult to obtain.
In Andi Back’s 2017 survey of US and Canadian academic art libraries, most re-
spondents indicated that exhibition catalogs were an explicit part of the library’s col-
lection development policy.33 Building collections requires purposeful scoping and
ongoing assessment to maintain alignment with an institution’s mission, patron
needs, and budget priorities. For example, galleries might focus on the artists they
represent,34 while museums often provide curators with resources to enhance exhib-
its or browsable collections for visitors. Academic libraries may focus on teaching and
research objectives or exhibition catalog creation within creative arts disciplines. Col-
lections might support community researchers conducting genealogical research or
help resolve disputes in artists’ estates. Various uses and purposes of the collection
should be taken under consideration, as well as geographical and chronological scope,
language breadth, and diversification of the canon. Attention to the strengths of re-
gional or consortial partners avoids duplication of effort, while upfront decisions about
managing gifts, unsolicited catalogs, duplicates, ephemera, and born-digital content
informs workflows. Materials of high institutional value, such as those featuring local
exhibits, may have higher demand and are also at higher risk for damage; this fact
may necessitate digital reformatting or collecting duplicate materials for browsing
or preservation.35
There are many strategies employed to acquire these materials. While it is possible
to obtain some catalogs through general approval plans, specialty art vendors often

31. Cummings, “The Art Reference Library,” 203.

32. Broker, “Exhibition Catalogues: A Guide,” 2–3; Andi Back, “The Collecting Practices for Art Exhibition Catalogs at
Academic Libraries in the United States and Canada,” Art Documentation 37, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 105, https://doi.org/10
.1086/697272; Niu, “Integrated Online Access to Objects and Archives,” 171–72; Lois Swan Jones, Art Research Methods
and Resources: A Guide to Finding Art Information (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1978), 31; Paula
Gabbard, “Insights and Overview: The ARLIS/NA Museum E-Book Publishing Survey,” Art Documentation 35, no. 2 (Fall
2016): 282, https://doi.org/10.1086/688728.
33. Back, “The Collecting Practices for Art Exhibition Catalogs at Academic Libraries in the United States and
Canada,” 109.
34. Lynda Bunting, Virginia Allison, and Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, “Art Gallery Archives: Professionalization of a
Commercial Sector,” Art Documentation 33, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 81, https://doi.org/10.1086/675708.
35. Morris, “Aspiring to Greatness with Hindsight and Foresight,” 95–121.
30 | A R T D O C U M E N TAT I O N | SPRING 2020 | Vol. 39, No. 1

are necessary to build collections, as well as for more targeted collecting to cover diverse
perspectives. Firm orders remain common, with selectors building extensive connec-
tions with artists, art dealers, and presses to maintain early awareness of new exhibition
catalogs.36 Gifts and reciprocal relationships between libraries and museums, such as
the donation of a catalog upon the loan of materials for an exhibit, is a component in
some libraries.37 Given limited print runs, patron requests can be problematic as a sole
acquisitions strategy,38 and rarity may necessitate the use of antiquarian dealers at greater
expense.

E X H I B I T I O N C ATA L O G S A S D I G I TA L E X P R E S S I O N S
Digital catalogs can take many forms, including e-books, websites, databases, or dig-
ital applications. At their most basic, they are digital manifestations of their print coun-
terparts. As PDFs or e-books, these documents are hosted on a variety of e-publishing
platforms, sold as e-books, or made available via print-on-demand services. Arts insti-
tutions are reimagining art catalogs as multimodal, interactive, and non-linear expe-
riences. Over the last two decades, arts organizations have established a variety of digital
initiatives designed to promote access to exhibition catalogs.39 Projects have included
digitizing print materials, developing catalogs in e-book and multimodal formats, re-
leasing data into the public domain, creating platforms to support emerging scholar-
ship, and engaging communities in participatory curation.
Many organizations began with digitizing print catalogs and curating digital collec-
tions. For example, some museums have digitized exhibition catalogs with the option
to print-on-demand through tools such as Collator or ISSUU.40 In response to a grow-
ing number of catalogs being shared in PDF format, in 2011 the Thomas J. Watson
Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art began a collection of PDF catalogs41 that
now contains over 1,000 contemporary art catalogs. Collection initiatives have included
institutional repositories on a more local level (e.g., the Graduate School of Art at Wash-
ington University in St. Louis)42 or at a regional level (e.g., e-Artexte).43

36. Back, “The Collecting Practices for Art Exhibition Catalogs at Academic Libraries in the United States and
Canada,” 106.
37. Grandal Montero, “Art Documentation: Exhibition Catalogues and Beyond,” 111.
38. Deborah K. Boudewyns and Shannon L. Klug, “Collection Development Strategies for Community Engagement,”
Collection Management 39, nos. 2–3 (2014): 150–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2014.890994.
39. Back, “The Collecting Practices for Art Exhibition Catalogs at Academic Libraries in the United States and
Canada,” 113; Tomlin, “Beyond the Monograph? Transformations in Scholarly Communication and Their Impact on Art
Librarianship,” 244; Jahre, “Printed Shows: Exhibitions and Their Catalogues during the Last Fifty Years,” 7.
40. Lisa Gabrielle Mark, “LACMA Launches Collator,” LACMA Unframed, June 7, 2018, https://unframed.lacma.org
/2018/06/07/lacma-launches-collator; Gary Hall, “The Unbound Book: Academic Publishing in the Age of the Infinite
Archive,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 3 (December 1, 2013): 490, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412913502032.
41. Tina Lidogoster and Andrea Puccio, “Catalogs with a Global Reach: Collecting PDF Contemporary Gallery
Catalogs at the Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Documentation 35, no. 2
(Fall 2016): 299,https://doi.org/10.1086/688729.
42. Jennifer Akins, “Establishing an Open-Access MFA Thesis Collection,” Art Documentation 37, no. 1 (Spring 2018):
44–54, https://doi.org/10.1086/697271.
43. Corina MacDonald, Tomasz Neugebauer, and John Latour, “The E-Artexte Digital Repository: Promoting Open
Access in the Canadian Contemporary Arts Research and Publishing Community,” Art Libraries Journal 39, no. 1 (2014):
10–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200018125.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 31

There are notable efforts by institutions creating and curating born-digital ex-
hibition catalogs, such as projects undertaken by The Menil Collection Library and
the Getty Foundation. The Menil Collection Library acquires born-digital as well as
digitized catalogs from select galleries in Houston, Texas.44 Meanwhile, the Getty
Foundation’s ongoing OSCI, launched in 2009, digitally publishes art catalogs in col-
laboration with eight museums.45 This collaboration provides opportunities for inter-
acting with art in new ways, such as the ability to zoom into artworks within an e-book
format or play embedded media.46 Given the investment needed to develop these plat-
forms, the original versions of these catalogs were not for exhibitions, but rather per-
manent collections.47 The design process often emphasized maintaining familiarity
and scholarly rigor while providing innovative features.48
Finally, contemporary platforms continue to connect exhibition data in new ways.
Artifex, a well-known publisher of digital catalogues raisonnés, captures data for reuse.
It has suggested that the future of publishing may become “less focused on produc-
ing books and more on managing content,”49 especially for the oeuvres of prolific art-
ists such as Sol LeWitt or Chuck Close, whose work continues to produce vast amounts
of imagery and data through ongoing exhibitions. Artifex is in conversation with a
number of institutions, including the Guggenheim and Rhizome, to share their data,
moving beyond a publishing enterprise.50 JSTOR Labs and Artstor Labs have teamed
up on a variety of experiments to reimagine how text and images can be mined and
reconfigured, from reimagining the digital monograph to collaborating with institu-
tions for better data integration.51 The BasArt Database, part of the Artl@s Project,
contains exhibition catalogs with embedded dates and geolocation metadata, allowing
researchers to study connections between people, artwork, art markets, and institutions
across space and time.52
This steady stream of new technology has revolutionized documenting collections
and exhibitions. The adoption of these initiatives has been slow for libraries, due mainly
to a lack of systems and technologies able to accommodate a growing collection of digital

44. Eric Michael Wolf and Lauren Gottlieb-Miller, “The Small Easy: Budget-Neutral Digital Projects at Small
Libraries,” Art Documentation 36, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 332–44, https://doi.org/10.1086/694248.
45. The Getty Foundation, Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age: A Final Report on the Getty Foundation’s Online
Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) (Los Angeles: Getty Foundation, 2017), 4, http://www.getty.edu/publications/osci
-report/assets/downloads/osci-report.pdf.
46. Getty Foundation, Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age, 61.
47. Getty Foundation, Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age, 61.
48. D. Samuel Quigley et al., “Scholarship and Digital Publications: Where Research Meets Innovative Technology,”
Visual Resources 29, no. 1–2 (March–June 2013): 100, https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2013.761122.
49. Ian McDermott and Erin C. Dunigan, “Art Book Publishing: Past, Present, Future,” Art Documentation 32, no. 2
(Fall 2013): 245, https://doi.org/10.1086/673515.
50. Ashley Levine, “Artifex Catalogues Raisonnés: Archivist as Curator, Workflows as DAMs” (paper presented at
ARLIS UK/Ireland 50th Anniversary Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, July 15–17, 2019).
51. “JSTOR Labs Active Projects,” JSTOR Labs, https://labs.jstor.org/projects/.
52. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel and Olivier Marcel, “Exhibition Catalogues in the Globalization of Art: A Source for Social
and Spatial Art History,” Artl@s Bulletin 4, no. 2 (2015): 92. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol4/iss2/8/.
32 | A R T D O C U M E N TAT I O N | SPRING 2020 | Vol. 39, No. 1

materials.53 Both libraries and museums point to knowledge gaps surrounding digital
preservation, issues navigating copyright, a lack of technological infrastructure, and
competing institutional priorities.54 Digital preservation is constant and ongoing as
new media, art, and documentation intertwine, especially as experimental technologies
become more pervasive.
Rather than viewing these challenges as barriers, librarians can increase the visi-
bility, use, and comprehension of these materials through instruction and collection
development. Simply by using these materials within instruction, librarians demon-
strate that they exist within collections often as crucial interventions within canonical
disciplines. By allowing for interaction and appreciation to increase, diverse voices, lan-
guages, and interpretations are inserted into how they are understood, accessed, and
browsed. In short, these documents should continue to be collected, preserved, and
critically engaged as the essential records that they are.

c r i t i c a l i n f o rm ati o n a n d v i s u a l l i t e r a c y i n s t r u c t i o n
O P E N I N G C O N V E R S AT I O N S
The unique positionality of exhibition catalogs allows them to bring together a range
of voices and topics that are sometimes poorly represented or understood.55 Students
recognize themselves in collections that speak to their communities, life experiences,
and research interests, and one way that librarians can reach students is by recogniz-
ing the empowering nature of source selection for instruction. Librarians can frame
catalogs as dialogic tools for critical information literacy56 and critical visual literacy57
partly because they are at the nexus of design thinking, visual culture, and visual rhet-
oric. For example, students might interrogate exhibition catalogs as one of the official
narratives of an exhibition and augment them with the reception of the exhibit and its
elements in various media, including news and criticism. They might contrast these
with other narratives, such as ephemera, correspondence, websites, or social media.

53. Back, “The Collecting Practices for Art Exhibition Catalogs at Academic Libraries in the United States and Canada,” 114.
54. Grandal Montero, “Art Documentation: Exhibition Catalogues and Beyond,” 115–16.
55. Nasar, “Exhibition Catalogs: Time for a Rethink?”
56. Here, “critical information literacy” refers specifically to the frames “Authority is Constructed and Contextual,”
“Scholarship as Conversation,” and “Information Creation as a Process” from the Framework for Information Literacy for
Higher Education, Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), 2015, http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl
/files/content/issues/infolit/framework1.pdf. However, it also draws from Elmborg’s definition of critical information
literacy (James Elmborg, “Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice,” The Journal of Academic
Librarianship 32, no. 2 (2006): 192–99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2005.12.004) and the use of radical information
literacy, centered in a dialogic approach (Leo Appleton, Gustavo Grandal Montero, and Abigail Jones, “Creative Approaches
to Information Literacy for Creative Arts Students,” Communications in Information Literacy 11, no. 1 (2017): 152, https://doi
.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.39).
57. For this paper, “critical visual literacy” draws from three specific readings of the term: Stephanie Grimm and
Amanda Meeks, “Break the Stereotype! Critical Visual Literacy in Art and Design Librarianship,” Art Documentation 36,
no. 2 (Fall 2017): 174–80, https://doi.org/10.1086/694238; Denise Newfield, “From Visual Literacy to Critical Visual
Literacy: An Analysis of Educational Materials,” English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10, no.1 (2011): 92, https://files
.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ935564.pdf; and Anahit Falihi and Linda Wason-Ellam, “Critical Visuality: On the Development of
Critical Visual Literacy for Learners’ Empowerment,” International Journal of Learning 16, no. 3 (2009): 412–13, https://
doi.org/10.18848/1447-9494/CGP/v16i03/46176.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 33

Students should also approach catalogs conceptually, evaluating visual dialogues and
arguments made through layout, imagery, and design choices.
No two catalogs are alike, even different editions from the same show; therefore,
classroom exercises that promote the exploration of various catalogs pique curiosity.
Such object-based inquiry58 recognizes the visual, textual, and interactive nature of
these materials. Through group activities, interpersonal learning is incorporated, while
also allowing for personal, independent, and reflective moments to occur. By grappling
with the purposes of catalogs, their relationships to other art documentation, and the
exhibitions themselves, students evaluate questions surrounding authority and au-
thorship, conversation and agency, bias and audience, inclusion and exclusion, prod-
uct creation, and design.59
One example of a notable exhibition and catalog whose discourse continues to
highlight schisms within American society is the 1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art
show Harlem on My Mind.60 It sought to bridge black and white residents of Harlem
but neglected to involve Harlem artists or residents. At a transitional moment be-
tween the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements, the exhibition perpetuated
the oppressive systems it sought to overcome. Bridget R. Cooks noted that not only
did the exhibition prove controversial, but the catalog did as well.61 Long after the ini-
tial controversy of the exhibition, the record of it lives on mostly through all four edi-
tions of its catalog. Initially published in 1968 to accompany the exhibition, the catalog
was reprinted with modifications in 1979, 1995, and 2007.62 Different reprints add
pieces of the controversy so that, depending on which edition is examined, there are
opportunities to find “discussions about the issues at stake in the conceptualizing of
the exhibition and the protests against it.”63 The editions as a set stand as a testament
to “an ideological struggle over who represents . . . a community of people engaged
in the making of America and in how to persevere, and even prosper, within it.”64
In bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, she em-
phasizes that ideas and resources alone will not generate a communal classroom that
engenders excitement.65 Only through “our interest in one another, in hearing one
another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence”66 can learning communities

58. Appleton, Grandal Montero, and Jones, “Creative Approaches to Information Literacy for Creative Arts Students,”
153–55.
59. Also referred to as the purpose/process/product model by Amy Hofer, Sylvia Lin Hanick, and Lori Townsend in
Transforming Information Literacy Instruction: Threshold Concepts in Theory and Practice (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries
Unlimited, 2019). See also Joan Petit, Sara Thompson, and Kevin Seeber, “Teaching ‘Format as a Process’ in an Era of
Web-Scale Discovery,” Reference Services Review 43, no. 1 (2015): 19–30, https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-07-2014-0023.
60. Allon Schoener, “A Retrospective Walk Through ‘The Harlem on My Mind’ exhibition at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1969,” Harlem on My Mind, n.d., http://harlemonmymind.org/retrospective.html.
61. Bridget R. Cooks, “Redux: Rediscovered Books and Writings: Harlem on My Mind,” Aperture, no. 223 (2016): 23,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43825317.
62. Cooks, “Redux,” 23–24.
63. Cooks, “Redux,” 24.
64. Cooks, “Redux,” 24. See also Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art
Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
65. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
66. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 8.
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embrace critical awareness and active engagement. Librarians embody these goals when
they are curious and excited about their students, materials, and subjects. Dividing an
instruction session into time blocks to allow for mindful activities, librarians can center
diverse perspectives and a range of interpretations through classroom dialogue.
While there are many models from which to choose, think-pair-share is a collabo-
rative, student-centered pedagogy that encourages mindful dialogue between students
and instructors. It also lends itself to hands-on, interactive activities with materials that
require thoughtful reflection. Students first reflect individually with an item, then dis-
cuss it with a peer or small group for optimal reflection and mindful feedback. Finally,
there is the opportunity for each group to report out to the class, where the librarian
acts as a facilitator and moderator of the discussion. In this model, students have the
opportunity to develop agency, first as they jot down their reactions and thoughts,
then as they share with a partner, and then again as they choose what to share with
the class.

CRITICAL DIALOGUE IN LIBRARY INSTRUCTION

Exhibition catalogs can be integrated into instruction activities for students to exam-
ine and compare. Art and design students take a keen interest in these professional
products of their fields. A dialogue with their peers allows them to practice the meta-
cognitive skills they will use later during critiques and exams. Questions might include,
how does the layout, design, and imagery of the catalog contribute to overall visual rhet-
oric or narrative? Does the catalog include all of the imagery from the exhibition or just
a snapshot? Does it follow the layout of the exhibition, or is it experimentally de-
signed? Is the catalog supplemented with online components? Might other artists
or voices have been included? How would they use the catalog, the exhibition, or its
elements for research? Sites such as Artsy, Wikipedia, Artstor, and Instagram might
be integrated for students to corroborate, verify, and augment research questions raised
by the texts.
One complex example is the award-winning project Mitakuye Oyasin by Aaron
Huey.67 The title translates as “All My Relations” and depicts the Oglala Lakota
Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation. Beautiful and thick with cover-to-cover photographs,
the book opens with three short testimonials but otherwise contains only images.
There are three inserts: a paper copy of a prison release form with graffiti art on its
inverse; an 8.511-inch sheet of class photographs, sitter unknown; and a Polaroid
photograph of a traditional Sioux warrior, complete with a faux crinkled paper back-
side. A National Geographic photojournalist and documentary photographer, Aaron
Huey is also known for his work with non-profit advocacy organizations. This work
was the product of a seven-year residency on the reservation following a larger proj-
ect about nationwide poverty.68 Editions of this book, sponsored by the Annenberg

67. Aaron Huey, Mitakuye Oyasin (Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2013).
68. Andrew Katz, “Why We Look Again: Aaron Huey at Pine Ridge,” Time Magazine, May 27, 2013, https://time
.com/3799842/why-we-look-again-aaron-huey-at-pine-ridge/.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 35

Foundation69 and the Lannan Foundation,70 resulted in a TED Talk71 and several
exhibitions.72
As a majority-minority university in a majority-minority city and state, with twenty-
three federally recognized tribes, the University of New Mexico’s second-largest mi-
nority student population is Native American.73 Amid this backdrop, where issues of
representation are discussed frequently, it is understandable that students approach
this text with a certain level of wariness. Drawn to the captivating imagery and visual
storytelling, students are skeptical once they discover that the author is a young priv-
ileged white man photographing Native American subjects. Adverse reactions have
included students calling this book problematic, with what they feel is an ethnographic,
colonizing gaze, perpetuating negative stereotypes about indigenous peoples.
While this work has received generally favorable press, one review captured sim-
ilar feelings. One Lakota member noted, “Some of us are trying to make our lives
and our children’s lives better. Alcohol, drugs, and gangs do not speak for all of us.”74
Indeed, upon seeing the finished project, “many Lakota echoed a similar sentiment,
disappointed that Huey, who had lived in the community and made connections with
its people, had only told one side of their story.” Huey, eager to rectify the situation,
returned to the community and created the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Proj-
ect, an online platform designed to host multimedia stories by Lakota community
members. “Each submission is a self-contained story of a moment or memory or place
that holds significance for the speaker, and each reflect[s] the desires, values, fears,
and hopes of the Lakota.”75 The result effectively unbinds the catalog, creating a digital
platform of “experiences and perspectives that provide a nuanced view of a complex
people, in their own words.”76
This vignette describes how carefully sourced catalogs and their online compo-
nents can galvanize conversations and encourage dialogue. In short, whose agency

69. Aaron Huey, “Seven Years on Pine Ridge: The Evolution of a Story from Photojournalism to Street Art and
Beyond,” filmed lecture at Annenberg Space for Photography, aired on January 31, 2013, Los Angeles, California, video,
8:08, https://annenbergphotospace.org/video/aaron-huey-seven-years-pine-ridge-evolution-story-photojournalism-street
-art-and-beyond/.
70. Lannan Foundation, “Aaron Huey: Mitakuye Oyasin” (press release), n.d., https://lannan.org/art/art-grants/aaron
-huey-mitakuye-oyasin/.
71. Aaron Huey, “America’s Native Prisoners of War,” filmed September 2010, Denver University, Denver, Colorado,
TED video, 15:21, https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey.
72. Annenberg Space for Photography, “Ancient Strangers in a Modern World” (exhibit), November 17, 2012–
February 24, 2013, guest curated by anthropologist, author and photographer Wade Davis. This exhibition featured Aaron
Huey’s photographic work from the Mitakuye Oyasin project. The lecture by Aaron Huey, “Seven Years on Pine Ridge:
The Evolution of a Story from Photojournalism to Street Art and Beyond,” was filmed on the occasion of that exhibit. He
also started a billboard project with Shephard Fairey called Honor the Treaties, and he created a film that toured to several
festivals and galleries (https://www.mountainfilm.org/media/honor-the-treaties).
73. The University of New Mexico Office of Institutional Analytics, The University of New Mexico Spring 2019 Official
Enrollment Report, February 2, 2019, https://oia.unm.edu/facts-and-figures/oer-spring-2019.pdf.
74. Justin Sedor, “Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project Gives Subjects Their Own Lens,” Resource Magazine
Online, September 11, 2012, http://resourcemagonline.com/2012/09/pine-ridge-community-storytelling-project-gives-subjects
-their-own-lens/9438/.
75. Sedor, “Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project.”
76. Sedor, “Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project.”
36 | A R T D O C U M E N TAT I O N | SPRING 2020 | Vol. 39, No. 1

is being promoted? Who has the authority to speak or represent communities, narra-
tives, artworks, or histories? What is at stake in representing, and who ultimately
makes these choices? What are the consequences of these choices? Students expect-
ing easy answers do not always find them with exhibitions or their catalogs. Rather
than shy away from such dialogue, librarians should encourage discussion, allowing
students to share thoughts, feelings, and opinions brought forth by the materials and
activities. Exhibition catalogs lend themselves to challenging source evaluation ques-
tions and transferable moments, allowing students to approach other problematic
sources.

d e s c r i b i n g e x h i b i t i o n c at a l o g s f o r e n h a n c e d a c c e s s
DESCRIPTION PRACTICES
Creativity is often exhibited in the format, layout, and design of exhibition catalogs, as
well as in the extensive range of intellectual and creative content. This variability pre-
sents a challenge for catalogers, who must describe them for optimal accessibility and
discoverability, very often in systems that are not yet set up to link them to the online
world of materials, events, and art forms. They can be some of the more challenging
materials to catalog and describe, especially if they have multimodal components,
translations, and conservation concerns due to creative elements (e.g., inserts, fur,
cloth). One reason for such variation in documentation originates with the differences
between museum and library description practices.
Fundamentally, museums and libraries share the common goals of collecting,
describing, and providing access to the objects in their collections. While librarians
classify and organize to facilitate access to resources, registrars document objects to
capture the history that makes an object distinct.77 Librarians catalog records by con-
necting and describing similar data, while museum registrars catalog objects as a doc-
umentation of ownership. The lack of a shared cataloging standard for cultural heri-
tage objects across libraries and museums is due in large part to these differences.78 A
slow alignment between the description practices of libraries and museums further
complicates the issue of how best to describe exhibition catalogs. The very nature of
exhibition catalogs makes describing them for the bibliographic universe challenging.
Librarians have been examining bibliographic cataloging standards for many years,
and discussion surrounding the replacement of MARC is ongoing. The library systems
that operate as closed relational databases are no longer compatible with rapidly evolv-
ing information.79 In 2007, around the same time that Tim Berners-Lee introduced
the concept of linked data, the Library of Congress (LC) began a community-led inves-
tigation into the “future of bibliographic control,” resulting in the adoption of RDA

77. Gabriela Zoller and Katie DeMarsh give an extensive comparison between library and museum cataloging in their
article, “For the Record: Museum Cataloging from a Library and Information Science Perspective,” Art Documentation 32,
no. 1 (Spring 2013), especially pages 56–65, https://doi.org/10.1086/669989.
78. Deirdre C. Stam, “The Quest for a Code, or a Brief History of the Computerized Cataloging of Art Objects,” Art
Documentation 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 7, https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.8.1.27947997.
79. Thomas Baker, Karen Coyle, and Sean Petiya, “Multi-Entity Models of Resource Description in the Semantic
Web,” Library Hi Tech 32, no. 4 (2014): 566, https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-08-2014-0081.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 37

(Resource Description and Access).80 The American library community, led by LC,
has continued to work toward the goal of linking bibliographic records to online vo-
cabularies with their LC Linked Data Service, which utilizes the Resource Description
Framework (RDF).
BIBFRAME (Bibliographic Framework Initiative), touted as the replacement for
MARC, utilizes linking via Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).81 MARC records use
text strings to connect to authority files (e.g., subjects, names), but this process is
static because it links two flat files that can be accessed only in specific environments,
such as a local online public catalog (OPAC). Linking via URIs connects dynamic and
machine-readable records that contain much more information.
The FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model,82 on which
the current cataloging standard RDA and the newer BIBFRAME are based, places im-
portance on the intellectual content of the work and its relationships with FRBR’s core
entity groups (work, expression, manifestation, and item). Catalogers working with
special collections material may also catalog using other content standards, such as
the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section’s DCRM (Descriptive Cataloging of Rare
Materials). DCRM instructs catalogers to follow specific guidelines for descriptive cat-
aloging and refer back to RDA for access points.83
If a library lacks a formal definition or procedures as to what constitutes an exhi-
bition catalog, staff will be forced to evaluate materials on a case-by-case basis.84 Some
libraries choose to treat an exhibition catalog like a circulating monograph, shelving it
within a browsable area of the stacks, while other libraries limit access and place catalogs
within special collections or archives. As with most special formats, the unique qualities
of each item add additional requirements to their description. Current cataloging stan-
dards emphasize describing the exact copy of a published work.85 Unique items, such
as exhibition catalogs, rare books, archival collections, and some audiovisual material,
might be unpublished and more challenging to fit neatly within an RDA record.86

B E N E F I T S T O E N H A N C E D M E TA D ATA
Regardless of content or format, implementing bibliographic control can help to al-
leviate many of the difficulties associated with collecting this material. As systems

80. Sally H. McCallum, “BIBFRAME Development,” JLIS.it 8, no.3 (September 2017): 72, https://doi.org/10.4403
/jlis.it-12415.
81. McCallum, “BIBFRAME Development.”
82. FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAD are being replaced by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA)
Library Reference Model (LRM) (https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11412).
83. Bibliographic Standards Committee, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research
Libraries and The Policy and Standards Office of the Library of Congress, Descriptive Cataloging of Rate Materials (Books)
(Washington, DC: Cataloging Distribution Service. Library of Congress, 2011), http://rbms.info/dcrm/dcrmb/.
84. Daniel Starr, “Some Comments on the Cataloging of Exhibition Catalogues, or, Who Was the Author of That
Exhibition?” Art Documentation 15, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 11, https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.15.1.27948812.
85. Jung-Ran Park, Lorraine L. Richards, and Andrew Brenza, “Benefits and Challenges of BIBFRAME: Cataloging
Special Format Materials, Implementation, and Continuing Educational Resources,” Library Hi Tech (November 30,
2018): 6, https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-08-2017-0176.
86. The 3R Project was recently completed with switchover scheduled for December 2020 (https://www.rdatoolkit
.org/node/202).
38 | A R T D O C U M E N TAT I O N | SPRING 2020 | Vol. 39, No. 1

become more interconnected, metadata influences the infrastructure by which in-

formation is exchanged, authority is created, and data is shared. By creating a biblio-
graphic record for each exhibition catalog, an institution increases the visibility, access,
and usability of its collections.
When an exhibition catalog is released, the bibliographic record often appears min-
imal, if one exists at all. There may be few access points for the information contained
within that first record. The host institution and exhibition curator(s) may be the only
names on the record, while artists and themes are absent. As more libraries add their
holdings to the item record, the bibliographic record evolves, additional access points
are created, or existing ones are enhanced, and metadata begin to link people, insti-
tutions, genres, and themes together. Both the Art Libraries Societies of North Amer-
ica (ARLIS/NA) and ARLIS UK & Ireland have published best practices for cataloging
exhibitions.87 ARLIS/NA’s Cataloging Exhibition Publications: Best Practices recognizes
the significant difference between exhibition catalogs and other areas of art documen-
tation, allowing for the use of local practices and guidelines, as well as the cataloger’s
judgment.88 For example, it recommends that the cataloger weigh the importance of
the contributor’s name as it is displayed on the piece to determine if an access point
should be constructed.89
Within the scope of the RDA cataloging standard, catalogers can assign relation-
ships to describe the role between people, corporate bodies, concepts, objects, events,
places, and subjects taken from a controlled vocabulary. This relationship descriptor
provides context for a specific role within the publication and exhibit. In this way,
RDA eliminates some of the more challenging issues of assigning responsibility to
a person, a problem that often plagued catalogers working under older standards.90
Other controlled vocabularies, such as the Getty Vocabularies (e.g., the Art and Archi-
tecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, Cultural Objects Name Authority,
Thesaurus of Geographic Names)91 and the LC Linked Data Service (e.g., Genre/Form
Terms, Subject Headings),92 also provide catalogers with terms for describing names,
subjects, cultural objects, geographic names, and genre headings.
As librarians acquire materials authored by traditionally underrepresented groups,
representing diverse languages and regions, the creation of Name Authority Records
(NARs) is an important step in the description process. This step has great potential
to highlight and track relationships between the many contributors to an exhibit. For

87. Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Cataloging Advisory Committee, Cataloging Exhibition
Publications: Best Practices (Calgary, AB: Art Libraries Society of North America, 2010), https://arlisna.org/publications
/arlis-na-research-reports/147-cataloging-exhibition-publications-best-practices; Art Libraries Society UK & Ireland (ARLIS/
UK & Ireland) Cataloguing and Classification Committee, Art Exhibition Documentation in Libraries: Cataloguing Guidelines
(Bromsgrove, UK: ARLIS/UK & Ireland, 2000).
88. ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee, “Name and Title Access Points,” in Cataloging Exhibition Publications:
Best Practices, 1.
89. ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee, “Name and Title Access Points,” 3.
90. Starr, “Some Comments on the Cataloging of Exhibition Catalogues, or, Who Was the Author of that Exhibition?,”
11–12.
91. The Getty Research Institute, “Getty Vocabularies,” https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/.
92. Library of Congress, “ID.LOC.GOV-Linked Data Service,” http://id.loc.gov/.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 39

example, artists may be known by several names, making it difficult to trace their
work. It is not uncommon for catalogers to consult multiple sources, such as websites,
social media, or the artist directly, to create a NACO (Name Authority Cooperative
Program) record. While libraries have been using this practice for many years, author-
ity control remains one of the most important contributions to the cataloging commu-
nity. For lesser-known artists, authority records serve to connect their work to a broader
audience.
In recent years, libraries and cultural institutions have made significant progress
in this area. What started as an attempt to create one authority file between American
and German libraries in the early 2000s has led to the Virtual International Authority
File (VIAF) that links national libraries’ authority records into a single virtual author-
ity file. This authoritative global data, in effect, makes it easier for catalogers to cre-
ate authority records for diverse persons internationally. There are many advantages
to VIAF since contributors to the individual national libraries have both the language
expertise and the geographic proximity to create quality authority records in their re-
gions. Moreover, these records have been added to Wikipedia since 2012 and Wikidata
since 2013, making this information more accessible and open to crowdsourced
corrections.93

t owa r d s a f u t u r e f o r ex h i b i t i o n c ata l o g s
P A R T I C I P AT O R Y A N D O P E N C U R AT I O N
As libraries and museums seek to invigorate collections and programming, there are
excellent opportunities for community collaboration and partnership. Crowdsourcing,
or efforts to draw the general public into curatorial activities, has been used across
the cultural heritage sector to accomplish large-scale tasks such as transcription, metadata
creation, information synthesis, and collection building.94 These efforts seek not just
to complete work by spreading it to large numbers of volunteers but, more impor-
tantly, to provide opportunities for the public to enhance collections and engage in in-
stitutional missions to promote the public good.95
Crowdsourcing does not necessitate large, anonymous “crowds” working on digi-
tal initiatives.96 For example, librarians might partner with community groups to host
Hack the Stacks events to make collection building more transparent and collections
more inclusive of diverse voices. In events like these, communities might recommend
exhibition catalogs they would like to see added to library collections, which presents
excellent opportunities to acquire specific titles that are missing, identify content gaps,
and strengthen collections in underrepresented areas.97 Libraries might also consider
leveraging existing relationships with communities to build new relationships and

93. Maximilian Klein and Alex Kyrios, “VIAFbot and the Integration of Library Data on Wikipedia,” The Code4Lib
Journal, no. 22 (October 14, 2013), http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8964.
94. Mia Ridge, “Introduction” in Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage, ed. Mia Ridge (London: Routledge, 2014), 6.
95. Ridge, “Introduction,” 8.
96. Ridge, “Introduction,” 4.
97. Abby Flanigan, “Hack the Stacks: Outreach and Activism in Patron Driven Acquisitions – ACRLog,” ACRLog
(blog), April 14, 2018, https://acrlog.org/2018/04/14/hack-the-stacks-outreach-and-activism-in-patron-driven-acquisitions/.
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obtain globally diverse content, as the University of Colorado, Boulder, has done in
asking biennial participants to help collect event ephemera.98 Similarly, crowdsourcing
efforts may seek to digitally restore library and museum collections lost to disaster
or war, as seen with the National Museum of Brazil Wikimedia Commons Campaign
and the Open Modern Art Collection of Iraq.99
For professionals, open curation may include practices such as using open data in
scholarly writing, providing a narrative of the curatorial process through blogs or cu-
ratorial notebooks, and inviting the public to participate in the development of author-
ity.100 While mechanisms to open curatorial and scholarly work challenge expecta-
tions of exclusivity and prestige that have come to be associated with the scholarly
catalog, they provide opportunities for increased accessibility, transparency, and im-
mediacy.101 Greater public engagement in curation often hinges on institutional abil-
ity and willingness to open data and share images of their collections. Copyright and
cultural property rights can understandably hinder these efforts for some collections,
but a growing number of museums are heeding the call to open their data for reuse
and sharing related artifacts such as historic exhibition catalogs,102 even going so far
as to make collections open by default and closed by exception.103 While openness re-
duces potential revenue associated with reproductions, it also reduces costs associated
with managing copyright and encourages the reuse of high-quality representations
of artworks.104
Opening collections facilitates the remixing of works often necessary for creative
endeavors. Through participatory campaigns, it can encourage the addition of verifi-
able information and images to open educational resources, as exemplified by Art 1
Feminism’s efforts to engage new audiences in adding content to Wikipedia. In ad-
dition, open data allows for integration in federated systems such as the Digital Public
Library of America (DPLA) and Europeana to encourage widespread discovery. Open
data also makes collections and the concept of exhibition catalogs accessible to inno-
vation through cultural hackathons, such as Code Da Vinci.105 Perhaps most critical, it

98. Alexander Watkins and Jane Thaler, “Collecting, Organizing, and Teaching the Ephemera of Art Biennials,” Art
Documentation 37, no. 1 (March 2018): 76, https://doi.org/10.1086/697279.
99. João Alexandre Peschanski, “After a Catastrophic Fire at the National Museum of Brazil, a Drive to Preserve
What Knowledge Remains,” Wikimedia Foundation (blog), September 10, 2018, https://wikimediafoundation.org/news
/2018/09/10/national-museum-brazil-fire/; Saleem Al-Bahloly et al., “The Open Modern Art Collection of Iraq: Web
Tools for Documenting, Sharing and Enriching Iraqi Artistic Expressions” (white paper), March 2, 2011, https://doi.org
/10.17613/M6HH1B.
100. Trevor Owens, “Curating in the Open: A Case for Iteratively and Openly Publishing Curatorial Research on the
Web,” Curator: The Museum Journal 59, no. 4 (October 2016): 428–31, https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12168.
101. Owens, “Curating in the Open,” 430.
102. Antje Schmidt, “MKG Collection Online: The Potential of Open Museum Collections,” Hamburger Journal Für
Kulturanthropologie (HJK), no. 7 (2017): 25, https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hjk/article/view/1191.
103. Sarah Powell, Adam Moriarty, Michaela O’Donovan, and Dave Sanderson, “The ‘Open by Default’ Journey of
Auckland Museum’s Collections Online,” SocietyByte, August 2017, https://www.societybyte.swiss/2017/08/21/the-open
-by-default-journey-of-auckland-museums-collections-online/.
104. Schmidt, “MKG Collection Online: The Potential of Open Museum Collections,” 32.
105. Antje Theise, “Open Cultural Data Hackathon Coding Da Vinci—Bring the Digital Commons to Life” (paper
presented at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress, Wroclaw, Poland, August 24, 2017), http://library
.ifla.org/1785/.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 41

provides content for students and communities to engage in the creation of knowl-
edge—and as noted by Greta Bahneman and Jeannine Keefer, “the better, more com-
plete and sharable the content, the more potential the collection has for digital practi-
tioners to examine, analyse, and transform the materials into new knowledge.”106

O P E N D ATA A N D L I N K E D S Y S T E M S
Data sharing and interoperability are integral to realizing a new future for exhibi-
tion catalogs. Catalogers can now create records for new artists and works that will
be much more widely available online. For both libraries and museums, linked open
data provides new opportunities to incorporate contextual information into catalogs
and discovery systems. Wikidata, a linked open data source with growing popularity
in the library sector,107 has been recognized as a potential hub to crosswalk data be-
tween languages and professional contexts. Increasingly, it provides an opportunity
for libraries and museums to enrich catalogs, connect them to other resources, im-
prove visibility of objects held in collections, and support discovery and analysis of art-
works for future research and reuse.108 Wikidata initiatives can be used to support a
range of new research, especially research that requires remixing data at scales that
would not be possible when data are siloed within bound artifacts. The underlying soft-
ware for Wikidata is a Wikibase, an extension to MediaWiki, the software that sup-
ports Wikipedia.Wikibase provides infrastructure for storing and managing structured
data in a collaborative environment.109 It also provides a platform for both humans and
machines to interact with linked open data.
While examples of URIs for exhibitions remain limited, the Getty and American
Art Collaborative already provide cases of URIs being used for artworks, artists, art
concepts, and places.110 The International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC)
provides a Conceptual Reference Model “intended to promote a shared understand-
ing of cultural heritage information by providing a common and extensible semantic
framework,”111 allowing exhibition data to be shared across institution types.112 For
example, the Museum of Modern Art includes excerpts from Wikipedia and the Getty’s
Union List of Artist Names in its artist catalog.113 Similarly, library catalogs, such as

106. Greta Bahnemann and Jeannine Keefer, “Developing Digital Collections,” in Glassman and Dyki, The Handbook
of Art and Design Librarianship, 72.
107. Karen Smith-Yoshimura, “Analysis of 2018 International Linked Data Survey for Implementers,” The Code4Lib
Journal, no. 42 (November 8, 2018), https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/13867.
108. Alexander D. Stinson, Sandra Fauconnier, and Liam Wyatt, “Stepping Beyond Libraries: The Changing
Orientation in Global GLAM-Wiki,” JLIS.It: Italian Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science 9, no. 3 (2018):
24–25, https://doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12480.
109. Carol Jean Godby et al., Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase: Lessons Learned from Project Passage (Dublin,
OH: OCLC Research, 2019), 18, https://doi.org/10.25333/faq3-ax08.
110. Karly Wildenhaus, “The Possibilities of Constructing Linked Data for Art Exhibition Histories,” Art
Documentation 38, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 26, https://doi.org/10.1086/702890.
111. International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC), Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) Special Interest
Group, “CIDOC CRM,” http://www.cidoc-crm.org/.
112. Wildenhaus, “The Possibilities of Constructing Linked Data for Art Exhibition Histories,” 32.
113. Fiona Romeo, “Bringing [Art] Knowledge to Everyone Who Seeks It,” Digital@MoMA, January 7, 2016,
https://medium.com/digital-moma/bringing-art-knowledge-to-everyone-who-seeks-it-899ec257a55c.
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those at the University of Wisconsin and Laurentian University, have begun to pro-
vide access to information about works and creators sourced from Wikidata.114
Moving from a discovery interface to the technical implementation, Rhizome ArtBase
is a repository established in 1990 for net-based art. It has experimented with Wikibase
as a more flexible tool for cataloging and preserving digital artworks that fall outside
traditional art museum relational database schema.115 A Wikibase was also recently
used in OCLC’s Project Passage as a user-friendly, pilot environment for creating
linked open data for bibliographic resources.116 Meanwhile, the Sum of All Paintings
Wikidata Project is a participatory effort to create a Wikidata item for every notable paint-
ing; this project has relied on data donations from museums, as well as crowdsourced
metadata from art catalogs.117 It has also led to efforts to describe what paintings de-
pict using artificial intelligence trained by humans playing the Wikidata Distributed
Game Depiction.118 Extending efforts like these to exhibition catalogs can assist users in
exploring the broader contextual information surrounding artists, artworks, and their
cultural contexts.
A gap remains for integrating linked open data into exhibition catalogs. However,
it does not take extensive staffing or technical resources to create a vision for the fu-
ture. When considering how to approach digital projects, organizations can begin to
conceptualize how these materials connect with their greater organizational mission
and holistically start to develop awareness of the questions surrounding existing and
future resources.119 Building upon this vision, libraries can take steps to experiment
and iteratively improve access, discoverability, and usability of exhibition catalogs.

conclusion
Exhibition catalogs have enjoyed a long history within arts organizations, libraries, and
archives. While there has been much research into their histories within collections
and their challenges as a format, there remain critical questions requiring further ex-
ploration and development. For example, how do institutions continue to bridge cul-
tural, educational, digital, and socioeconomic divides so that art, exhibitions, and their
catalogs remain accessible? As libraries and museums continue to streamline curato-
rial and documentation practices, how do they ensure that data is shared as transparently
and equitably as possible? How might various institutions, large and small, resourced
or not, sustain crucial outreach, instruction, and collections work with art communi-
ties? The answers to these questions are multifaceted and complex.

114. “ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations,” 30–31.

115. Sandra Fauconnier, “Many Faces of Wikibase: Rhizome’s Archive of Born-Digital Art and Digital Preservation,”
Wikimedia Foundation News (blog), September 6, 2018, https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/09/06/rhizome
-wikibase/.
116. Godby et al., Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase, 18.
117. “Wikidata:WikiProject Sum of All Paintings,” Wikidata, https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?titlepWikidata
:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings&oldidp994911076.
118. Andrew Lih, “Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale,” Now at the
Met (blog), March 4, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2019/wikipedia-art-and-ai.
119. Emily Rafferty and Becca Pad, “Better Together: A Holistic Approach to Creating a Digital Preservation Policy in
an Art Museum,” Art Documentation 36, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 149–62, https://doi.org/10.1086/691378.
 Art Catalogs Unbound | 43

One solution might include decoupling exhibition catalogs from their current book
format to reach outside institutions to the communities affected by their content.
Crowdsourcing initiatives, participatory platforms, and community hackathons decol-
onize collections and practices, creating spaces for underrepresented and marginal-
ized communities to represent themselves and speak their truths. As more of these
projects are created and maintained, their impact increases, especially as growing
numbers of artists, authors, and institutions contribute open data and creative works
for remix and reuse.
Through engagement with critical information and visual literacy instruction, in-
novative technologies, and metadata enhancement, exhibition catalogs can leverage
these new opportunities afforded by an intensely social and networked online envi-
ronment. Such initiatives build connections between events, people, places, and art-
works in unforeseen ways, enabling collections to become living archives for years to
come. Librarians, partnered with art communities, can create a technologically rich
future, where information is social and data is open, transparent, inclusive, and just.
The strategies that libraries adopt for describing, collecting, and sharing this content
have lasting impacts on how artists’ work is promoted and studied.