Art Libraries Society of North America

The Art Libraries Society of North America (also known as ARLIS/NA) was founded in 1972. It is an organization made up of approximately 1,000 art librarians, library students and visual resource professionals.

ARLIS/NA fosters excellence in art and design librarianship and image management, through activities such as:

Before ARLIS/NA, art librarians organized under an American Library Association Round Table. However, ALA support was limited. Meetings were only held biannually, attendance was minimal, and professional progress slow. During the post-war years the world had opened up, and through the influence of popular magazines like Time (magazine) and Life (magazine), Americans were exposed to a range of cultures. According to Wolfgang Freitag, “Hundreds of new museums and libraries were built every year…there was an explosion of publications in the traditional formats on all subjects.” All of these developments led to the very real need for art librarians to organize.

By the late 1960s, against ALA's wishes, a separate, short-lived art libraries group was created in conjunction with an existing museum sub-section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of ALA. This proved to be temporary, too, as support was again limited. According to William J. Dane, "We didn't like being called a sub-section. We didn't need to depend on ALA or ACRL. There were enough of us who said, 'The hell with you.' Once the idea of independence got going, it was irreversible." ARLIS/NA was founded by art librarians attending the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago and was the brainchild of Judith Hoffberg, who had been inspired by attending meetings of ARLIS/UK in London. The informal annual meetings of art librarians with College Art Association furthered the initiative to organize. According to Wolfgang Freitag, “The Association of College and Research Libraries was but one of several library organizations in which art librarians were enrolled at that time.”

By 1982 a major section of ARLIS/NA had broken off to form its own group, Visual Resources Association (VRA). Wolfgang Freitag said "The growth of the two organizations has strengthened the profession as a whole so that it is stronger today than we could have imagined thirty and twenty years ago. It is a consolation that this happened even though, or perhaps because, the two main branches of what to my mind is still an indivisible profession gained their strength by following different paths and by marching to different drummers."

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