Call for Poster Proposals, ARLIS/NA 2024 Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) will hold its 52nd annual conference, POP! in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania April 2nd to 5th, 2024.

As the Society’s second conference held in Pittsburgh during the twenty-first century, POP! offers an opportunity to draw from our past and create change for our future, using both our host region and its distinctive artistic legacy as inspiration. The theme POP! invokes the playful vibrancy of Pop Art and its history in Pittsburgh and the wider Ohio Valley. From canonical icons Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to the first nationally syndicated Black woman cartoonist, Jackie Ormes, the history of Pop is baked into the DNA of the region. More contemporary Pop artists like street artist Jordan Wong, Jenny Holzer, and Keith Haring–all born and raised in the Ohio Valley–underscore that our history and our future are made richer as they become more inclusive and diverse.

As a membership and a profession, we are reckoning with and expanding our understanding of the past while also considering what lies ahead. POP! offers the Society an open-ended prompt to interpret and explore–we look to POP! as a source of renewal, imagination, and with a sense of expansiveness that begs the question, what sort of future can we create together? 

The Pittsburgh Conference Program Committee invites librarians and library professionals, archivists, curators, museum professionals, visual resources specialists, publishers, educators, artists, designers, architects, students, and scholars to propose posters that reflect the theme POP! as it relates to the practice of visual arts information and scholarship. In the spirit of Pop Art, the committee also encourages submissions that stretch the bounds of traditional conference scholarship in terms of format and delivery as well as content by drawing on the movement’s use of irony, playfulness, and parody.

Prospective presenters interested in funding and support for conference attendance are encouraged to apply to the Society’s Conference Attendance and Travel Awards or to contact their local ARLIS/NA Chapter about the availability of additional awards.

The program committee encourages submissions that include, but are not limited to:

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility
• Local Art and Architecture
• Advocacy, Social Justice, Anti-Racism, Public Policy, and Activism
• Archives, Rare Books, and Special Collections
• Collection Development and Management
• Critical Librarianship
• Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship
• Alternative Publications, Artists’ Books, Graphic Novels, Zines, etc.
• Teaching and Pedagogical Practice
• Fair Use and Copyright Issues
• Leadership, Mentoring, Management, and Professional Development
• Visual Literacy
• User Experience

POSTER: A Poster presents an idea through text and images, and communicates the main concept without a presenter. It also facilitates conversations between the presenter and a small audience during scheduled viewing hours. Poster sessions often focus on case studies of completed projects, initiatives, strategies and best practices, or works-in-progress. Sharing ideas and receiving feedback from colleagues in one-on-one conversation are ideal outcomes of a poster session. Presenting a poster can be a good entry point for those new to participating in professional conferences, and can be developed later into presentations or publications.

Note: Poster presenters will be responsible for printing posters and mounting them in the display area at the conference in advance of scheduled viewing times. Panels and basic mounting supplies will be provided.

ARLIS/NA POP! is an in-person conference happening in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Posters will only be presented in-person; there will be no virtual poster session. Poster presenters should plan to attend the conference in-person.

Additional Details

The following fields will be used by the programming committee to review proposals. In addition, some non-personally identifiable demographic information will be used by the reviewers to ensure that the posters are inclusive and diverse, both in the voices present and content delivered.

WORD LIMIT: All proposal abstracts are limited to 250 words or fewer.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: You’ll be asked to list 1 learning objective, takeaway, or goal for your proposal.

TOPICS: You’ll be asked to select 2 to 5 topics relevant to your poster.

AUDIENCES: You’ll be asked to pick up to 5 target audiences for your poster.

DEIA-AR: You will be asked if your poster addresses issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and/or anti-racism. The committee is particularly interested in seeing submissions that include attention to DEIA-AR.

YEARS IN PROFESSION (optional): You’ll be asked to select how long you have been working in the field.

FIRST TIME PRESENTER (optional): You’ll be asked if this would be your first time presenting at an ARLIS/NA conference.

SELF-IDENTIFICATION (optional): You’ll be asked if you are a member of a marginalized group. This information will only be used to help us coordinate a diverse session and is not required to propose a poster.

How to Submit Proposals

The review of proposals is a blind peer review process. You must anonymize your proposal description. All personal or institutional names must be removed from the description and learning objectives (however, these details must remain in other fields of the form), and may be replaced by terms such as “presenter,” “author,” or “speaker”, or in the case of institutions, terms such as “large academic library,” “small museum library,” etc. Non-anonymized proposals may be ineligible.

Submit your poster proposal via OpenConf.

The deadline is December 22nd at 11:59pm ET.

Please direct any questions to the Program Co-Chairs: 

Courtney Hunt, Ohio State University (hunt.877@osu.edu)

Michele Jennings, University of Dayton (mljennings01@gmail.com)