Call for Posters - ARLIS/NA 2025 Virtual Conference

Call for Posters
ARLIS/NA 2025 Virtual Conference

May 12-16, 2025

The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) will hold its 53nd annual conference, Together: Activating Community, virtually May 12-16, 2025.

Together: Activating Community is the first ARLIS/NA conference that has been planned virtually and will be executed entirely online. This year of experimentation with an online format democratizes the conference experience, enabling more people to participate and attend. This virtual format aligns with ARLIS/NA’s strategic goals of inclusivity, accessibility and financial sustainability, marking a significant milestone in our journey. We hope you share our interest in exploring creative and dynamic approaches to virtual professional development and networking.

While we recognize some things will be missed, we are excited to explore new ways of coming together for our conference, and this move is a proactive step towards supporting our community’s diverse needs and our organization’s long-term resilience. 

The 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 Together: Activating Community as it relates to the practice of visual arts information and scholarship. The committee also encourages submissions that stretch the bounds of traditional conference scholarship in terms of format and delivery as well as content.

Submit your poster proposal via OpenConf.

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

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility
• 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

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. Posters often focus on case studies of completed projects, initiatives, strategies and best practices, or works-in-progress. Sharing ideas and receiving feedback from colleagues are ideal outcomes of a poster presentation. Submitting 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: 

ARLIS/NA Together: Activating Community is a virtual conference. Posters will only be presented virtually. Poster presenters will be responsible for sending poster files for upload in the conference platform in advance of scheduled viewing times. Poster presenters should plan to register for and attend the conference.

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.

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 for submission is March 14 at 11:59 pm EST.

Please direct any questions to the Posters Co-Chair:

Beth Shoemaker, Victoria University (beth.shoemaker@vicu.utoronto.ca)