Since its founding in 1887, the Pratt Institute seal has served as the primary bookplate for its library collection, embedding institutional identity into the very fabric of its holdings. Over time, a series of redesign efforts-many led by distinguished artists and designers-attempted to replace the seal, yet none succeeded. This article examines those unsuccessful revisions as a case study in the visual culture of academic branding, drawing on original archival research and a review of bookplate scholarship. By contextualizing the Pratt seal within the broader history of ex libris design and institutional visual identity, it reveals how bookplates, seals, and logos serve as both artistic expressions and contested symbols of heritage. The narrative highlights not only the persistence of a flawed image, but also the creative dead ends and aesthetic debates it inspired, underscoring the value of archival collections in preserving stories of failed ambition, institutional memory, and the evolving language of design.
Dance for camera (also known as screendance) is a subset of the already under-considered field of dance, occupying a liminal space between dance, film, new media, and performance art. As such, dance for camera has rarely been considered in depth in terms of its descriptive records in archival and library spaces. This article considers the current status of dance for camera records through the comparison of records from the Dance Heritage Video Archive, Jacob's Pillow Archives, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, and Merce Cunningham Trust. It makes suggestions for paths towards improvement that honor the interdisciplinary nature of these and other types of resources existing at the intersections of different cultural fields.
Curators at university museums utilize expansive library collections for exhibition research. Their work demonstrates a professional application of research skills that students within the affiliated disciplines at the university are learning and applying in their coursework. Curators' research is synthesized into exhibitions panels, wall labels, and exhibition catalogs intended for a general public audience. However, a noticeable difference between the expectations of academic research for publications or coursework and those for exhibitions is the absence in the galleries of a curator's bibliography associated with their exhibition research. In order to increase the visibility of scholarly research needed for curation of art and design exhibitions, the humanities and design librarian at the University of Minnesota collaborated with the director and the curator of the Goldstein Museum of Design to create a Goldstein Museum of Design LibGuide for disseminating curatorial exhibition bibliographies.
For decades, arts activists have advocated for parity in whose work is shown across demographics, yet what has gained less attention is how those exhibitions have been documented and published. This study takes on the issue by investigating a dataset of exhibitions and the reviews and catalogs about them from 2016 to 2017 to determine proportionality of coverage. Findings vary in which demographics are more frequently covered by media, but overall there was less written about artists of color, particularly women of color. This is notable when considered in light of traditional sources on which art libraries depend.
This article examines the ways art museums utilize unstructured, non-taxonomic metadata fields to describe objects in their online collection catalogs. The goal in conducting this analysis is to highlight how using these fields inconsistently undermines critical cataloging efforts by making entries appear biased when viewed in comparison. Though classification has been the primary focus of critical cataloging theory, the author argues that the narrative capacities of free-text fields make them equally ripe for perpetuating hegemonic ideas. Critical ekphrasis is the term coined as a theoretical and practical approach to ameliorating this problem and includes guidelines that catalogers can cite when tasked with interpreting collection objects. In keeping with the existing critical scholarship, these emphasize plurality, accountability, transparency, and historicity. [This article is a revision of the paper that received the 2025 Gerd Muehsam Award. The award recognizes excellence in a paper written by a graduate student on a topic relevant to art librarianship or visual resources curatorship.]
