Kraig Binkowski (Yale Center for British Art)

In the late fall and early winter of 2017 I undertook a fellowship to assess at first hand many of the functions, policies, processes, goals, and challenges of several important London art libraries. The purpose of the ARIAH-RIHA Fellowship is to foster an exchange of ideas and information between ARIAH and RIHA institutes. My fellowship focused on the re-evaluation of library photo archive collections, their importance to scholars and libraries’ efforts to enhance discovery and access to these resources. This examination also necessarily touched on acquisitions, instruction, and collection assessment in relation to these visual resources. While in London I was stationed at the Courtauld Institute of Art, in the Witt and Conway Photograph Collections, and I travelled to the libraries of the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Paul Mellon Centre, the Royal Academy, and the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts. My presentation will focus on the collections mentioned here – my impressions of their approaches to visual resources such as photo archive collections: how these collections are assessed, made discoverable to scholars, how they fit into bibliographic instruction efforts, all of which to form a thesis about the current state of these visual collections within a microcosm of art libraries in London at a seminal point in their history.   

Kraig Binkowski has been the Chief Librarian for the Reference Library and Archives at the Yale Center for British Art since 2005 and has been an art librarian for nearly 25 years with previous positions at the Delaware Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Kraig is active in ARLIS/NA and ARLIS/UK and Ireland and serves as a deputy editor for the Art Libraries Journal, having previously served as its reviews editor.