Depth of field: Connecting library exhibition space to curriculum and programming

Introduction

A traditional image of an academic library might contain rows of shelves, filled with books that might not be used on a regular basis. However, as libraries work toward collaborating with and for the communities they serve, opportunities arise to open up the collection. Curating a library exhibition with resources from the stacks is one way to bring items into a new light for patrons. When the exhibition is tied to curricular elements, even more collaborations and possibilities are available.

This article will discuss how an academic library curated an exhibition to complement the institution’s common reading book selection for the academic year. Two library employees spent a year working on this exhibition, from inception to installation. The particular book chosen as the common reading selection covered a wide variety of themes and provided the library ample opportunity to use our resources to create an interdisciplinary exhibition. We will discuss how we took complex themes from the book as well as from visual culture theory to create an exhibition for first-year students.

Beyond the discussion of the exhibition itself, this article will also discuss lessons learned throughout this process. For projects like these, while there are often many innovative ways to bring visitors to the exhibition, in order to bring ideas to life, thoughtful and strategic collaboration with stakeholders outside the academic library is required as well as expertise inside the library to truly open up the collection.

Literature review

Academic libraries have used their space for exhibitions for decades. Fouracre (2015) claimed that exhibitions grew from the idea of library displays, which started as far back as 1654 at the Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Over time, exhibitions within libraries have been seen as more of a curated and intentional project, often with a narrative to help guide the viewer (Fouracre, 2015). As academic libraries continue to shift to accommodate changes with higher education and their students, space has opened up for more exhibitions. Montgomery and Miller (2011) go as far to say that within the next decade, libraries will continue to shift away from being simply a space for collections and become a place to be used by users. Within this place model, students, faculty and staff will collaborate and interact in the library in new ways and exhibitions become a space for that interaction to occur. Since almost 10 years have passed since Montgomery and Miller’s article, we have begun to see libraries make that change to create interactive and collaborative spaces for their communities.

For libraries, a primary purpose of exhibitions is to introduce users to their collections. Beyond a simple introduction to a collection, scholars such as Caswell (1985) identified four results from exhibitions: education for patrons, increased circulation of items, improved public relations and influence on collection development. Some libraries have taken exhibitions and exhibition spaces to the next level (see Beahan et al., 2009; Beals, 2007; Keith et al., 2017; Leousis and Sproull, 2016; Vander Broek and Rodgers, 2015) and have involved students, departments and other campus partners to either co-create, co-curate or inform the space and the type of material and content included. Some of these exhibitions have also utilized technology in new ways; this helps facilitate learning with patrons or helps bring digital content into the physical space.

As we can see from this sample of existing literature, much of it focuses on case studies and reflective pieces around institution specific exhibits and exhibitions. While this scholarship is important, and helps to inform practice, there could be more. The gap within the library and information science literature is a common critique and has been identified by Fouracre (2015) and Novara and Novara (2017), both who ask for more theoretical work to be done to confirm that exhibits ‘…are powerful scholarly products that support the educational mission of the university’ (Reece, 2005: 366).

This theoretical work around library exhibits also serves another purpose to the field. A subsection within this literature discusses the question of whether curating an exhibition should be seen as analogous to a form of scholarship. The often cited 1993 article by Bowen and Roberts discusses how exhibits are seen as the ‘illegitimate children’ of academic libraries. Bowen and Roberts push for recognition that creating exhibits is seen ‘…as a fully legitimate scholarly enterprise’ (1993: 407). Novara and Novara (2017) expand upon this idea and confirm that creating exhibitions requires similar amounts of in-depth research, time and resources that it requires to publish a scholarly article. Curating an exhibition requires a critical thinking skill set in order to articulate a concept, gather the necessary resources and construct the space and materials so that a viewer, often a novice of the topic being presented, may clearly and concisely understand the exhibition’s intent. The field continues to grapple with adequately recognizing the scholarly contribution of exhibitions and does look to fields such as museum studies for insight and guidance on ways to move forward.

While this article focuses on exploring a particular exhibition in an academic library, we hope that it is clear to a reader the level of intentionality and intellectual rigor that went into conceptually creating Depth of Field. Large ideas and concepts from the common read selection and visual culture theory were explored and then had to be distilled into something a general audience could read and understand. This article is an attempt to explain our conceptual ideas and understand our process in creating this exhibition.

Exhibition context

The Depth of Field exhibition grew from a long-standing collaboration between the University Libraries and Penn State’s Common Reads program. Each year, the university chooses a book that would be read by the incoming class. Accepted students receive a free copy of the selected title and are asked to read the book over the summer. The university hosts a variety of curricular and co-curricular events to support discussion around the book and provide a common experience for the first-year students.

At Penn State, a programming committee that included representation from the Libraries as well as other stakeholders across campus were tasked with brainstorming and hosting these curricular and co-curricular programming and events. The goal of this committee, and the events they hosted, was to extend the ideas in the common reads selection beyond one semester and keep the conversation going with the Penn State community throughout the year.

The 2017–2018 common reads title was It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, a memoir by Lynsey Addario. This memoir traces Addario’s life from her humble beginnings as a photographer after college, to today, where she is a well-known female war photographer. This book was chosen for a variety of reasons, but some of the major factors included the interdisciplinary themes throughout the memoir, the readability of the book and the starting spot of being a college student who is unsure what their future will entail.

In conversations with the programming committee in summer 2017, Hailley Fargo realized an opportunity existed for the Libraries. Maloney said it best, ‘The library, which stands at the intersection of the curricular and co-curricular realms, is well positioned to help all members of a campus community maximize the teaching and learning opportunities such demographic diversification will offer’ (2012: 282). Since this book covered multiple topics and borrowed from a handful of disciplines, having a library exhibition around the themes would be one way to facilitate discussion and learning. Fargo proposed the idea to the programming committee and everyone was excited for this exhibition. The group asked for the exhibition to occur in the spring semester, to help extend the conversations around It’s What I Do. At this initial planning stage, Fargo also hoped that classes being taught in the spring could use this exhibition within course curriculum. This goal helped to guide part of the exhibition’s purpose.

At this point, Fargo sought out their colleague, Rachel White, to help with the exhibition. White’s educational background includes a masters in textual and visual studies, where they specifically focused on war photography. It seemed like a natural choice to bring White on to the exhibition to help bring these ideas to life. As we began to brainstorm this exhibition, our driving motivation was to create an exhibition that was relevant to students and the public, with accessible content that would help foster dialogue.

Conceptualizing Depth of Field

In initial conversations around what Depth of Field would contain, we knew we wanted to highlight the intersections of the history of war in the Middle East with the history of war photography and photography in general. In highlighting these intersections, we also wanted to bring in aspects of visual literacy; throughout the exhibition, viewers should be able to see how war photography and our media-saturated world contributed to the way these images are viewed and interpreted by the public. We wanted to achieve what Maloney has proposed that ‘Well-curated displays can transform “passive” library collections into communal spaces of discovery, cultivation, and contemplation’ (2012: 282). However, before we could explore these intersections, we had to understand some grounding ideas from visual culture theory. In particular, we needed to identify a critical framework of semiotic theory and create an exhibition where the viewer could understand these concepts at play.

Textual and visual culture theory

Depth of Field was conceptually driven by the assumption that stand-alone presentations, textual or visual, are two-dimensional. Individually, each format lacks engaging components and, therefore, allows the observer or reader to remain passive. According to Becker, visual culture theory ‘cannot be seen as a unified field of inquiry’, a viewer requires more than just visual elements in which to engage with an image (Becker, 2004: 150). Images alone invite the observer to place their preconceived ideas onto this canvas or this can guide the viewer to a singular story. The written word alone fails because the reader asks the text to describe something and interprets this text as truth, but the reader can never know if it is actually true. However, when text and image intersect, they take on elements of one another and create a new space where dialogue between these elements can begin.

For our exhibition, we relied on the work of Jacques Rancière. However, in order to understand his ‘emancipated spectator’, we needed to establish a framework from one of his predecessors, Charles S Peirce. This was an important framework because we also knew our primary audience would know very little about these two philosophers and needed to distill their large ideas into more digestible thoughts. We observe and interpret the world based on the triad of sign/representamen, object and interpretant.

A sign is something which stands for another thing to a mind. To its existence as such three things are requisite…it must have characters which shall enable us to distinguish it from other objects…it must be affected in some way by the object which it signifies…it shall address itself to the mind. (Peirce, 1986: 82)

The majority of interactions we have with the visual world are primarily passive. However, when text becomes the image and image becomes text, it forces viewers to engage with these formats by subverting their anticipated response. Utilizing these mediums in tandem creates what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘emancipated spectator’. The goal of text as image and image as text is to create tension, a strategic way of ‘dispositioning the body and the mind where the eye does not know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should make of it’ (Ranicère, 2009: 105). This apprehension that occurs when the viewer does not know what to make of the text/image becomes the starting point of transitioning from being a spectator to an ‘emancipated spectator’. Within war photography, the photographer creates a re-presentation of war with the aim of rehumanizing and individualizing those within the frame. This new visual imagery compels the viewer to actively engage with the visual material by re-establishing the individual, human connection between themselves and those within the frame.

When considering the relationship between text and image, there is also a dynamic discussion about the role of the photographer. They may edit their images to suit their needs and attempt to lead the viewer to a singular solution, dependent on the image alone. The photographer takes great care in framing the scene, and their editor astutely chooses what images to include in a story all in the hopes of guiding a viewer to draw a conclusion. An image is a moment in time, something happens before the shutter is released and continues afterwards. There is a literal border between the viewer and the photographer. This space in-between is one of photography’s strengths. It allows for questioning and discussion. It is not a period; it is an ellipse. One side effect of this though is that an image may end up being misappropriated.

Perhaps ultimately the control of the image lies within the apparatus itself. That is why text plays an important role to help extend the image beyond the frame. There is always the chance of losing something in translation but using both forms of communication helps guide the discussion for the viewer. As Rancière notes, ‘the problem is not counter-posing words to visible images. They are images…forms of redistribution of the elements of representation’ (2009: 97). In order to bring the viewer from passive observer to ‘emancipated spectator’, the photographer needs to be able to anticipate what the viewer thinks she will see and then deliver the complete opposite. The image/text needs to disrupt the cultural norms of the viewer.

War photography

War photography gained popularity as a medium because humans were curious about the reality of war, beyond what they learned through mediums such as the written word or paintings depicting famous battles. Editorial discretion, otherwise known as the ‘CNN Effect’ (Kirkpatrick, 2015), capitalizes on the public’s desire for ‘truth’ and eyewitness documentation. Singular images came to stand for entire conflicts. For example, a widely associated image of the Vietnam War was taken by Nick Ut in 1972. In this Pulitzer prize winning photograph, a young Vietnamese child is running down the road, away from a Napalm bombing. This image evokes a strong emotional response which lends itself to being an easily digestible image. Due to this easy digestion, the image also stands to be co-opted by others who may want to use it in positive or negative ways, to achieve a certain outcome. Text by itself could make a reader paint a mental picture, but here was an image that was proof of what war looked like. Many of the photographs taken during the Vietnam War had a sense of immediacy and created a visceral experience for the viewer. There is a danger in using photographs to represent entire conflicts; it is not logical to think that an entire conflict, culture or issue can be reduced down to a singular image. Text is needed to provide the context and push the viewer to be active in digesting the images.

Traditionally, war photography has created an ‘us versus them’ quality, a natural consequence of war. Viewers are used to seeing action shots, dead bodies and destruction. In order for conflict to succeed, there needs to be division. In past conflicts, the public has not seen everyday scenes of those living in war zones. What interested us in Addario’s work was her use of the ‘everyday moment’ in her photography. Throughout her memoir, she tried to show the reader how her photography, as well as that of her peer photojournalists, tries to break down this divide and present the viewer with an image that establishes common elements. We believe that these everyday moments best represent visual cultural theory, because they demonstrate ‘…common understandings and experiences’ (Becker, 2004: 151).

We hoped to carry out this ‘everyday moment’ in two ways: through selecting resources to display that were from non-Western photographers who were documenting the war and through a collaboration with Keith Shapiro, a visual arts professor on campus. Shapiro was part of the common reads programming committee and had mentioned a collection of relevant photographs when Fargo introduce the exhibition to this committee. He visited Syria in the early 1990s and took photographs of what they considered to be mundane moments. However, as time passed from that trip, he realized that documenting those moments was significant and portrayed a sense of peace. We felt that having a selection of these images in our exhibition would be a way to not only to collaborate with an outside stakeholder but also to celebrate faculty work.

Understanding our audience

In creating Depth of Field, we knew we needed to consider our target audience: first-year students. Our incoming students were born in 1999 or 2000 and do not have strong personal memories of events like 11 September 2001. This meant that their knowledge of the war conflicts in the Middle East might be hazy, vague or non-existent. We felt that due to this audience context, it would be wise for us to devote a portion of our exhibition to giving some overview on the Middle East war conflicts and set the stage for the complex conversation we wanted to have about war photography.

Additionally, in tying it back to visual culture theory, we knew that students come to college with different semiotic systems based on their social and cultural knowledge. Every day, students engage with art mediums (audio, visual or textual) and those formats communicate values. Within a scholarly environment, we wondered how to acknowledge those differences, but proceeded to challenge those ingrained values and ideas via our exhibition on war photography. By challenging what students see as the ‘norm’, we were asking them to actively engage in our exhibition and consider the images in front of them. We hoped that if students engaged with our materials, they would take a step toward being global participants. Depth of Field sought to broaden the knowledge base of our first-year students and encourage them to seek out what they did not know.

Turning conceptual ideas into an exhibition plan

For the first several months of working on Depth of Field, our work was conceptual, with no strong idea of how this would translate into an actual exhibition. We brought these broad ideas to the Libraries’ Exhibition Committee, who make decisions and support a variety of big and small exhibition spaces within the library. They were supportive of this exhibition and asked us to come up with both a narrative and learning outcomes. Our exhibition was framed around showcasing female war photographers and non-traditional war images. We wanted our viewers to leave the exhibition knowing about the evolution of war photography over several decades. Along with this narrative, we were able to identify five learning outcomes to guide our exhibition:

Viewers will be able to start actively engaging in the dialogue around war and visual mediums using library resources in order to digest the images and understand multiple sides of a conflict.

Approval of our narrative and learning outcomes allowed us to start working on actually creating the exhibition, for a February 2018 opening. The one hesitation from the committee was our scope. As a reader of this article can see throughout this section, the scope was large. Due to the interdisciplinary nature and complex ideas around images and the viewer, it would be a challenge to distill this information into a digestible, understandable format for an incoming first-year student and the general public. Having a manageable scope became one of our biggest obstacles as we created the exhibition; we had to keep refocusing and returning to our learning outcomes to guide us.

Constructing Depth of Field

With our concept and learning outcomes in mind, we spent the next several months of the fall semester gathering relevant materials, deciding on how our narrative would play out within our exhibition space, checking images for fair use and creating the appropriate labels to describe our content. In selecting images, we chose images that would force visitors to reassess their approach to text/image collaborations and challenge preconceived notions of war photography. We were also conscious of the images selected and intentionally did not choose any images that explicitly presented death. While death is represented throughout the exhibition, we wanted to show how photographers can show this idea in a variety of ways and sometimes without the physical presence of death itself.

The space for our exhibition was in our Libraries’ Diversity Studies Room. While we had initially thought our exhibition would be two small cases at the entrance to our library, the exhibition committee felt we could thrive in a larger space. This new space allowed us the ability to think strategically about the narrative we wanted to tell in Depth of Field. Having an exhibition in the Diversity Studies Room also means that we, as the curators, must display a range of experiences and viewpoints, which we knew from our materials would not be difficult to accomplish.

Our Diversity Studies Room is a space primarily for students to study, with a variety of tables and carrels with desktop computers. In-between this study space are four vertical cases and two c-shaped cases to display items. The room also has three walls that can be used for signage or other photographs. Students can enter this space from several spots, and this required us to think carefully about how they would interact with our exhibition. We also had two external cases that could be used as ‘teaser cases’; these cases sat a short distance away from the entrance of the Diversity Studies Room and had been used by previous exhibitions to attract potential visitors into the space.

What we knew about how students used the Diversity Study Room influenced what materials were placed in which cases. We knew that best practices indicated exhibitions should have a natural narrative flow to them, in order to allow for informal learning (Wineman and Peponis, 2010). Our larger narrative centered around the idea that as a visitor moved through the space, they would encounter a chronological story of both photography and war that culminated in the two c-shaped cases in the middle of the room. Because students could enter from multiple spots, we knew that similar cases should have smaller, sub-narratives, so that regardless of how students navigated the space, they would see a story or theme. Although we hoped that viewers would linger with all the material in the cases, we knew that would not happen every time. Therefore, we made sure the chronology of the material in the vertical cases could have been viewed as a stand-alone exhibition and conversely, the c-shaped cases could have been viewed as its own exhibition.

Our four vertical cases highlighted female photojournalists and gave a visual history of war photography. War photography, much like war, has traditionally been a male-dominated profession. With our connection to Addario and being in the Diversity Studies Room, we wanted to acknowledge the contributions of the female photojournalists. We recognized that, for female war correspondents, it is often more dangerous for theme, due to their gender. We began with the journalistic work of Margret Fuller, who is often seen as the original female war correspondent. Alongside Addario, we included work by Lee Miller, Dickey Chapelle and Margaret Bourke-White. As the viewer moved from case to case, they saw images from World War II, the Vietnam War, the Korean War and conflicts in the Middle East from the 1990s and early 2000s. Beyond our female war photographers, these cases also included images taken by Don McCullin, James Nachtwey, Chris Hondros, among others.

For us, the c-shaped cases were the heart of our exhibition. The physical space between these two cases encased the viewer as they viewed the progression of traditional war photography into present-day war imagery. Today, we do have alternative versions of war photography and had the opportunity to feature work by Tim Hetherington, Ashley Gilbertson, Sarah Glidden, Gohar Dashti, Jananne Al-Ani and Alfredo Jaar. We decided to begin our progression of war photography with images of the Vietnam War. Although there had been numerous examples of conflict photography prior to Vietnam, this conflict provided us with a good starting spot based on the space we had available for these ideas.

One of the major reasons that Vietnam images received the response that they did was that the frame was full of action. In contrast to World War II images of triumphant heroes liberating the oppressed, the Vietnam conflict showed soldiers committing violent acts. These images contained explosions, blood and bodies and elicited a very visceral response from the public. These images often moved American viewers to action, including the pressure put on political entities to end the war. Vietnam was one of the few conflicts where photographers made it seem that they had complete, unfettered access to soldiers, civilians, death, prisoners and destruction. This up-close personal access at times made the images seem surreal to the public.

From Vietnam, we moved to the first Persian Gulf War. Due to the impact of Vietnam imagery, visual material from the early 1990s conflict was scrubbed clean for the viewing public. The advancement of technological warfare and satellite imagery bled into the visual compendium of the war. Images produced during this conflict were visually and physically distancing. Completing the first c-shaped case was work by Ashley Gilbertson and Tim Hetherington, who focused on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

During the early 2000s, we can start to see a shift in the content of war imagery; we begin to see more the absence of a body. The change concerns not just what is contained within the frame, but how the material is actually presented to the viewer. Death does not appear as often as in the Vietnam images so, when it does, its impact is felt even more. In Ashley Gilbertson’s (2014) Bedrooms of the Fallen, the viewer is presented with a book that shows bedrooms in pristine condition awaiting the return of its inhabitant. The bedrooms are adorned with movie and music posters, favorite perfumes and cologne, stuffed animals and photos of loved ones. After several minutes of looking at the image, the viewer begins to be disturbed as she realizes that the inhabitant is not coming back and probably has not been back for a significant amount of time. It is a sad voyeurism and a reminder of the absence of the body.

Tim Hetherington spent several months in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan embedded with the occupying unit. He, along with journalist Sebastian Junger, produced several stories around their experiences there. Hetherington’s (2010) book, Infidel, reads like a visual journal. In the entire 237 pages, there are only three images that contain a dead body. The bodies that Hetherington does decide to show are soldiers not in the middle of battle but instead wrestling on the ground like siblings or sleeping curled up on a cot like a small child.

As the viewer moves from the first c-shaped case to the second, we see that the conflict imagery continues to evolve. The viewer is presented with the 2016 graphic novel Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden. This is a nonfiction account of Glidden’s journey through Turkey, Syria and Iraq. She joins her freelance journalist friends as well as a mutual acquaintance who is a former combatant and, together, this group covers the refugee crisis. While using the graphic novel form to depict war is not new (consider the work of Art Spiegelman’s Maus), it is interesting to consider how a viewer would interact with these drawn images instead of traditional war photography. Glidden created some of her panels from photographs she had taken along her journey and, when appropriate, illustrated conversation in Arabic. The graphic novel makes the material accessible to the viewer and provides an alternative to war imagery that depends on both text and image to be understood.

The next images were taken by female artists and illustrated the next phase of war photography. Gohar Dashti, a female Iranian photographer, creates staged photographs of a couple performing daily tasks against the backdrop of war. For example, in one of the images, the couple is sitting down to a family meal with a tank in the background. The refusal to focus on action sequences challenges a viewer’s anticipated response to war imagery. The juxtaposition between domestic daily life and environmental indicators of war forces the visitor to sit with the image. At the same time, the viewer has to accept that ‘everyday moment’ when war is present but people are still living their lives. What begins to emerge between the viewer and the viewed is a common experience, such as a shared family meal.

Adjacent to the works by Dashti are images created by Jananne Al-Ani. She utilizes aerial perspective akin to satellite and drone imagery and focuses on the landscapes of areas of conflict. There are no bodies, no action except for the vague sense from the viewers’ perspective that they are watching from above. What the viewer can see is the imprint of war on the landscape. The viewer can interpret a sense of loss in the beauty of that landscape.

All the selections in the c-shaped cases build to the final examples that feature Alfredo Jaar’s use of text/image. We featured four examples of Jaar’s exhibitions. These exhibitions utilize a collection of over 40,000 negatives that Jaar amassed during a trip to Rwanda in 1994. Jaar’s work is keystone to the exhibition as he is able to produce conflict photography in a way that manufactures engagement in the viewer. By intentionally ending the exhibition with Jaar’s work, we wanted the viewer to leave the space still in the mindset of being an ‘emancipated spectator’.

The problem Jaar faced was how to present the material around the Rwanda genocide in a way that had an impact on the viewer. One of the reasons that wars are successful is that people are able to frame their opponents as faceless, nameless, the ‘other’. The goal for Jaar was to give voices and names to those who lived that would resonate with the global community. One project he completed was to send postcards to people he knew in other countries with names of survivors. The postcards he used were ones he had purchased from tourist spots in Rwanda, and on the back, he would write ‘[name] is still alive!’

In another exhibition, titled Real Pictures (1995), Jaar buried images in black archival boxes. On the top of each box, text explained the image buried inside. By taking away the image and the normal visual signs such as color or symbols, and instead, presenting it with text, the viewer is challenged to think beyond her normal boundaries. The viewer is left with a blank slate. What can a viewer infer visually from text? This ability to strip away viewers’ preconceived ideas and notions aids in the ability to establish a connection between two beings based on the simple idea of humanity.

We also featured some images from Jaar’s 1997 exhibit The Rwanda Project. This exhibit contained gorgeous landscape pictures of Rwanda. To accompany each picturesque landscape is text that tells the story of the atrocity that happened on that spot. As the viewer gazes at the image, in the perspective of looking up at the sky, she has to reconcile the beauty with the ugliness that is war.

Our final work from Jaar was his 1996 The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. Although we were not able to reproduce the installation, we were able to provide our viewer with the major idea. As an installation piece, images, set on a timer, flashed before a viewer’s sight. Each image was text that told the story of Gutete Emerita, a woman who lost her entire family during the genocide. The last image showed the eyes of Gutete Emerita. The viewer has to read the images, literally, and then for a brief moment meets the eyes of this person who up until this point they had never met. In this space, Emerita does not ask for pity, but her story asks for understanding. It asks the viewer to act so that atrocities like genocide do not happen again. The way that Jaar puts together the exhibition is calculated, but his goal is simple, make the human connection.

Finally, along the walls of the Diversity Studies Room, we had about a dozen photographs from Shapiro. These images helped to highlight the aim of humanity and the common experience. In the images, kids about the same age as incoming freshmen were engaging in everyday occurrences like hanging out with their friends. Presenting images such as these helps to break down the barriers that exist between cultures and help viewers to form connections as it allows for the viewer to find similarities between herself and those represented in the image.

Lessons learned

In total, we spent a year working on this exhibition, beginning with our initial idea, to installation in February 2018 and deinstallation in August 2018. During the 6 months Depth of Field was on display, we had hundreds of visitors look through the exhibition, did a handful of docent tours for internal and external audiences and spoke to the local student newspaper and local TV station. We learned a lot from this experience and would like to offer some of our lessons learned.

During the conceptual planning on Depth of Field, we spoke with faculty members from the visual arts department and discussed ways this could be embedded into course curriculum. We believe that exhibitions that are explicitly tied to course objectives, assignments and/or embedded within the syllabus allow for the deepest engagement with our target audience. Combining the exhibition with the curriculum helps ensure it is a meaningful part of the university and plays a role beyond just bringing new visitors into library spaces and opening up the collections. Our conversations with the visual arts faculty started during the summer, as we conceptually created the exhibition. However, once the fall semester began, it was harder for us to keep up these conversations. One faculty member was on sabbatical and, in the end, these courses did not intentionally use Depth of Field the way we had envisioned. In this process, we learned that, yes, intentional collaboration with disciplinary departments is necessary for this sort of work but patience and regular communication are required. At times, the dedication to building a relationship requires the same amount of work as that needed to build the exhibition itself.

As a reader can see from this article, the concepts we covered were vast and complex. Not only did we try to tackle these large issues, but we also tried to create an exhibition that was more ambitious than previous exhibitions in the Diversity Studies Room. While this ambition helped us create a memorable exhibition, it also meant that some of our loftier ideas of displaying our collection did not turn into reality. For example, we originally planned to copy images that we wanted to use and place them on dummy books. This would allow students to check out books they found interesting, since we wanted this exhibition turn our ‘passive’ collection into something active. However, this proved to be a massive time commitment and we did not have the additional staff to implement this idea. We had to pivot and instead placed entire books in the cases with the page opened up to the image we had selected. Exhibitions like ours have hopefully paved the way for new workflows with our exhibition committee.

As with many exhibitions in libraries, assessment can be difficult. Our original plan was to utilize a new iPad application that would allow viewers to provide feedback through a survey and see additional online resources. However, the application was finicky and ultimately did not work. This meant we ended up removing the iPads from the exhibition and did not have a backup plan to collect assessment data. If we were to do another exhibition again, we would think more strategically about paper methods of collecting feedback, such as having a reflection prompt on a wall where visitors could write on a sticky note with anonymous comments. We did hear, anecdotally, that colleagues and stakeholders did find the exhibition thought-provoking, which we deemed a success.

In the final stages of installing Depth of Field, Penn State decided to end the common reads program. The programming committee that Fargo was a part of stopped meeting and the motivation to provide programming and events throughout the spring 2018 semester ended. We could not have planned for that and this lack of campus commitment to the spring 2018 programming around It’s What I Do meant that some of our ideas for movie nights, panel discussions and classroom docent tours lost the buy-in we would need.

Conclusion

The Depth of Field exhibition visually confirmed the library’s commitment and interest in the Penn State Common Reads Program. Our work on this exhibition not only brought the ideas of It’s What I Do to life but also found a dynamic way to show viewers our robust collection of materials on this topic. We found a way to take abstract ideas and make an exhibition where visitors could think about images and walk away with something new to consider.

This exhibition was the product of collaboration, both between the library and external stakeholders as well as between Fargo and White. Depth of Field was successful because we were able to leverage the expertise of each other to create something that had not been done before at our library. Together, we were able to utilize a large amount of our collection on this topic, take complex ideas from visual culture theory and visual literacy and distill them into something manageable for our viewers and highlighted the photography of a visual arts faculty member.

Transforming library space into exhibition space helps to disrupt the passive, traditional academic library. We see that disruption with Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube, where he argues that, in the 1960s, a movement began to redefine the use of gallery space by ‘eroding the traditional barricades set up between the perceiver and the perceived’ (1986: 97). The aim of this experiment was to suppress the traditional spectator experience of visiting a gallery space. The experience of navigating through the gallery space was the ‘art’; visitors became part of the exhibition and it was through that experience that the spectator was transformed. In the same way, repurposing part of the library for exhibition space compels visitors to become more than spectators, passively ingesting library resources. Depth of Field was an opportunity to cultivate an active viewer and this process can help inform future exhibitions within the academic library.