Juan Antonio Pérez Simón has built one of the most extensive art collections in Mexico and it is well-known around the world. One of the least known facets of Juan Antonio Pérez Simón's collecting is that of a bibliophile, a facet that has led him to form one of the richest private libraries specializing in art in Mexico, known for its great expanse and diversity of themes, as well as for the importance of the works that comprise it. The Juan Antonio Pérez Simón (JAPS) Library is the custodian of Pérez Simón's book collection and strives to manage, research, and preserve the collection in order to strengthen and enrich it.

When the diversification of collections is a priority for a library, making diverse content in existing holdings more discoverable is a useful complement to the acquisition of new resources. Artists and authors from diverse groups, and material written from diverse perspectives, can be made more visible to patrons, either through enhancements to catalogue records or the creation of standalone indexes focussed on those groups. With the conscious, ethical diversification of collections a relatively new enterprise for many libraries, certain aspects of how best to proceed are not yet clear, meaning librarians need to make time to reflect on, and review, the methods they are using to improve discoverability.

The ARLIS UK & Ireland Cataloguing & Classification Committee supports the cataloguing and classification of all art materials in libraries, promoting effective discovery of library resources for the visual arts, architecture and design, and by supporting development and research in the sector. In the first half of 2021 we organised two webinars, one an introduction to cataloguing given by Victoria Parkinson1, and the second a demonstration of cataloguing by Amy Staniforth, alongside her colleagues Simon French and Lloyd Roderick2. From the attendance and feedback, and it was clear there was an appetite for more talks that introduced aspects of cataloguing.

I was seven years old when I read my first comic book. Asterix and Caesar's gift has never really ranked amongst my favourites in the long-running French children's comic book series but the impact it had on me at the time was nothing less than life-changing.

Cataloguing has existed for millennia but until January 2021 there was no formal code of ethics for this branch of the information profession. But what is the Code? Who created it and why? How was it produced? Is the Code immutable and what relevance does it have in day-to-day cataloguing work now? Can institutional experiences of encountering and resolving ethical dilemmas in creating, sharing, enriching and maintaining metadata be shared for mutual benefit? This article, based on a presentation delivered by the authors as part of the ARLIS UK Cataloguing and Classification Ethics series delivered online between April and June 2022,1 provides examples of how the ten ethical statements of principles can be used to inform cataloguing in art libraries.

Response to a plethora of historical forces that devalue comics, including hostile cataloging standards, led to the creation of the Best practices for cataloging comics and graphic novels using RDA and MARC21. The guide supports comics cataloging using current standards, recognizing the great diversity in this sequential art medium, as well as needs particular to public, academic and special libraries. With this, and related current and future projects, the Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table (GNCRT) hopes to promote equity in comics cataloging, and improve patron access to comics.

Melbourne Art Library was established in 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, as a uniquely independent art library in Australia. The library's development – which may be equated to a kind of practice-lead-research exploring what a library is – has not been without its difficulties. Yet, despite this, the library is three years strong and provides a specialised lending collection of over 3000 books, a reading room, and an active program of public events.

Research collections in art reflect, in part, the cultural and artistic activities of a country and by themselves constitute a heritage. Two of the most important research collections in Mexico for arts are in the custody of the Institute of Aesthetic Research (IIE) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Library of Arts (BA) of the National Center for the Arts (CENART, Ministry of Culture). This paper gives an overview of these collections to expose their relevance and the potential they offer for research in the arts.

This article presents a case study reflecting on the first two years of collecting crowdfunded comics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The case study demonstrates the significant resource investment required to start such a specialized collection, and that the project met its goal to diversify the comics collection by adding titles from BIPOC and LGTBQ+ creators.

Neutrality is one of the founding principles of library classification; however, systems reflect the biases of the societies that created them. Many articles have been written on bias in the Library of Congress Classification System (LCC) and its subject headings (LCSH). But how is bias evident in the Fine Arts (N) range?

One answer to this question lays in the writings of Hope A. Olson who argues that systems like LCC are inherently prejudiced because of their use of universality, which results in hierarchical relationships and Derridean binaries. This is problematic because library classification, according to Olson, functions as a third-space, a place where meaning is created.

Reading the Fine Arts range through Olson's work reveals a system that perpetuates bias by reconstructing the western canon of art history through its privileging of fine art over craft. While each of the fine arts are given their own subclasses, craft mediums are located under one subclass, Decorative Arts (NK), giving them a lesser than status. Artists and art historians have argued that the valuing of fine art over craft in the western canon, something clearly seen in LCC, is a consequence of patriarchal and colonialist power systems.

The British Library established a corporate Anti-Racism Project (2020) designed to encourage participation via six subgroups, with staff recommendations incorporated into “Enacting Change”, the Library's Race Equality Action Plan (2022). The research and recommendations of the Cataloguing and Metadata subgroup fed into a pilot project proposed as a proof of concept to develop end-to-end workflows, focused on the South Asian Collection and the Caribbean Collection. Work has already been done to align ethical approaches to cataloguing with the Library's values. During the pilot project, new training modules for an ethical approach to metadata are being developed. The outcome will be to remove barriers to access and embed sustainable best practices.

The PHAROS online search platform is now open and free to use by researchers of all types. The online portal at artresearch.net has been developed using ResearchSpace software and funded through grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and the Samuel H. Kress Foundations. This initial version of the portal includes the holdings of seven Pharos institutions, numbering over 2.8 million images. In the coming months, additional PHAROS members will add their holdings to the online portal, bringing the number of images represented to over 25 million.

This article will outline how Merrill's first principles of education and the Taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives were leveraged to scaffold the construction of an OER visual literacy tool. It will demonstrate how each object of these two guides can be paired with specific H5P activities. The outcome of this tool is to build upon students’ visual literacy knowledge so that they can analyse a work of art while gradually removing their reliance on detailed or frequent prompts.

The British Library holds a significant collection of printed materials in, and about, North American Indigenous languages that largely speaks to a history of colonial and settler-colonial projects and collecting. This article suggests one way of exploring what that collecting context means for how we find, experience and encounter language texts in the library. It offers an approach to ‘reading’ catalogues that puts texts in conversation with cataloguing systems to both contextualise and challenge the legacies of collecting in knowledge organisation today. It traces a brief history of the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH), ‘Indians of North America—Languages’, a term that reoccurs in the British Library's catalogue. This history shows how parts of the catalogue are artefacts of problematic bodies of knowledge, whilst also surfacing examples of Indigenous resistance that can be used to reframe the catalogue.

An account of the first thirty years of National Life Stories oral history project, Artists’ Lives, covering its origins, context, aims, organisation, technology and dissemination. The project is housed in the British Library.

Applying a Linked Open Data (LOD) approach to modeling the visual structure and content of comic books and graphic novels enables the description of these works to be enhanced through the process of semantic enrichment. This strategy may be particularly impactful for graphic medicine, a non-exclusive genre of comics that communicate medical and healthcare information, including personal stories of illness. However, the metadata for these works may lack references to healthcare-related vocabulary, thesauri or ontology that would more precisely describe their contents. This material may include pages and panels that illustrate specific medical topics, such as symptoms, side-effects or treatments — subjects that often overlap with other healthcare challenges, including mental health and illness. Exploring an LOD approach for describing comics content may potentially enhance the discoverability of this material and its ability to be remixed and reused, and better connected to other information resources.