Talk: Art Publishers, Artists and E-books

This talk was of a panel entitled, “Collecting to Serve the Needs of the 21st Century Art Patron”, moderated by Amanda Bowen. My talk was a primer on the four primary formats of digital publication - EPUB, App, Web, and PDF - along with listings of examples of each type from various museums and art publishers.

And as with other talks I did around this time, I created the presentation as an EPUB rather than PowerPoint slides, and presented it directly from an iPad.

Panel Description

Art research these days involves taxing issues, locating appropriate materials in accessible formats and finding these in a local library. Our speakers will present four ways that these needs can be addressed. The visual art field has been one of the last to embrace electronic publishing, although our users increasingly expect such access; artists, museums and publishers have begun to expand these offerings in intriguing ways. Access to small run and open access art journals is lacking and full text web searching leads to an overabundance of false results. The Artist Journal Index, created by one of our speakers, provides a solution for access to these publications. Documenting emerging art and artists requires collecting the catalogs of worldwide biennial exhibitions; we will discuss the challenges in identifying and acquiring these resources. Finally, those art libraries that collect most heavily in foreign language art publications have found the need to pool resources and share collecting strategies to meet the needs of their patrons.

Other Speakers/Participants

• Amy Ballmer, Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Ray Anne Lockard, University of Pittsburgh
• Amanda Bowen, Harvard University