Exhibiting Bibliographies: Curating a LibGuide for University Art and Design Museums

Curators at university museums utilize expansive library collections for exhibition research. Their work demonstrates a professional application of research skills that students within the affiliated disciplines at the university are learning and applying in their coursework. Curators’ research is synthesized into exhibitions panels, wall labels, and exhibition catalogs intended for a general public audience. However, a noticeable difference between the expectations of academic research for publications or coursework and those for exhibitions is the absence in the galleries of a curator’s bibliography associated with their exhibition research. In order to increase the visibility of scholarly research needed for curation of art and design exhibitions, the humanities and design librarian at the University of Minnesota collaborated with the director and the curator of the Goldstein Museum of Design to create a Goldstein Museum of Design LibGuide for disseminating curatorial exhibition bibliographies.