Reimagining Canadian Art Practices and Art Collections

Abstract

The authors examine two Canadian art initiatives that librarians from Canadian universities have undertaken at individual and institutional levels. The first project addresses an in-progress artists’ biographical dictionary that focuses on an under-documented form of art practice and situates the dictionary within an evolving landscape of biographical art reference resources in Canada. The second initiative reports on a collection management project that assembles essential Canadiana print material and recontextualizes it with renewed visibility and access. These projects are supplemented with an extensive literature review by a third art librarian that parses the library and information science literature related to these two topics and focuses on Canadian scholarship, where available, as a frame of reference. Together, the three sections of this article enrich the bio-bibliographic information about, and exhibition histories of, Canadian artists while improving access to essential research publications and collections.