Tag: subject liaison

Reframing Traditional Models: Research Needs in the Performing Arts

I occupy an unusual position in academic librarianship. As a continuing appointment performing arts librarian serving the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, I straddle multiple worlds: subject specialist and generalist, curator and reference provider, researcher and daily practitioner. In other words, my work constantly shifts between different expectations and evaluative frameworks.

By comparison, my colleagues in music librarianship benefit from established professional infrastructure: specialized graduate training, the Music Library Association’s networks, standardized practices, and decades of scholarship. By contrast, librarians working with theatre and dance inhabit a professionalization gap. There is no dedicated graduate program, little in the way of shared training, and only fragmentary community infrastructure. As a result, this absence is not simply inconvenient; it shapes how tenure committees evaluate our work, how we articulate our expertise, and how effectively we support our constituencies.

Scott Stone (2023) notes that 40% of Music Library Association members now work beyond music specialization. Nevertheless, evaluation systems often remain grounded in older categories—either the “deep specialist” or the “broad generalist.” Hybrid roles like mine don’t fit neatly into either, even though performing arts librarianship often demands more disciplinary expertise, not less.

Consequently, this essay argues that performing arts librarianship requires frameworks that recognize creative research as distinctive: recursive, embodied, community-centered, and often resistant to the models libraries have traditionally used. To illustrate these dynamics, evidence from five studies—Fleming-May, Marini, Mayer, Dalal & Shane, and Stone—underscores both the gaps and the opportunities. My own practice with students demonstrates why new approaches are urgently needed.

Complementary Studies

Rachel Fleming-May’s (2025) meta-ethnography combines findings from 23 studies on how creative artists seek information (2019–2024). She sees that professional artists and scholars view emotions, memory, and experiences as valid sources of information. They describe creation as “dynamic information making.” This means research happens alongside practice, not before it (558). Artists seldom feel frustrated when they can’t find information. Instead, they see engagement as “an opportunity for creative dialogue rather than [addressing a deficit]” (558). Fleming-May shows how creative research differs from traditional academic work. Similarly, artists see making as a learning process. Even when alone, they keep a dialogue going. They also value exploration and chance discoveries.

Fleming-May examines professional artists in a broad manner, while Francesca Marini focuses her attention on theatre scholarship and its specialized practitioners. Marini’s 2007 study included 41 interviews. She spoke with theatre scholars and performing arts archivists from Italy, the U.S., France, and Belgium. Performing arts information professionals share five key traits with the scholars they help:

  • Attention to context.
  • Sensitivity to time and ephemerality. 
  • Creativity 
  • Passionate engagement 
  • Interdisciplinarity

Significantly, many have backgrounds as practitioners, like actors, directors, dancers, and designers. They also point out that there isn’t just one method, like there isn’t one form of theatre. Archivists and librarians are key research partners, helping users spot connections, both inside and outside the material, that might go unnoticed. By documenting proactively—arranging recordings, soliciting materials, they promote the creation of sources that would not otherwise exist. As one archivist puts it, “The archive has to be alive; it has to be an active entity… Theatre cannot be a dead issue” (29).

Impact on student experience

At the same time, these patterns become visible—and often troubling—in student researchers. Jennifer Mayer’s (2015) case study of upper-division performing arts students at the University of Wyoming found they struggled with multimedia discovery, couldn’t reliably distinguish primary from secondary sources, and found interdisciplinary research challenging to navigate. Dance students turned to Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube before library tools—not from laziness, but because these platforms matched their visual and exploratory habits (419). Students’ image selections often diverged from faculty expectations, revealing visual literacy gaps. Costume and scene design students reported unmet research demands and “tension between what sources the professors want versus what is realistically available” (423).

One sustained intervention demonstrates how to address these challenges. Heather Dalal and Robin Shane’s (2023) seven-year collaboration at Rider University embedded the librarian in courses and shifted toward collaborative, in-class research. Instead of demonstrating databases, they had students share images in Google Slides and conduct peer evaluation using prompts: “Is this first-hand research? What helps you know that? Does this feel like good research?” (1). Pairing iterative practice with ongoing feedback reduced anxiety and improved outcomes. Their approach succeeds because it treats creative research as distinctive practice requiring specialized support—not deficit remediation.

These studies mirror my experience: the gap between struggling students and expert practitioners is significant; traditional systems don’t fully serve creative researchers; and effective support begins by reconceptualizing what counts as research and how libraries partner in it.

Supporting MFA students

I work closely with MFA students whose research challenges assumptions about information-seeking. They often investigate connections between and embodied experience and knowledge; direct plays through non-linear, emotionally driven, community-centered processes where performance itself becomes research—creation and investigation happen simultaneously, not sequentially.

When they request research support, traditional frameworks often fail. Their processes are recursive: create, reflect, research, create again. Students draw from personal experience, community knowledge, and bodily understanding alongside scholarly sources. These are sophisticated behaviors, yet library systems and instruction models don’t consistently recognize them as legitimate scholarship.

Here, Marini’s framework helps me understand why certain approaches work. When I function as research partner rather than service provider—actively suggesting connections, participating in interpretation, understanding the ephemeral nature of their work—students respond differently. When I acknowledge my own theatre engagement (attending performances, understanding rehearsal processes), I build credibility.

Further more, theatre research still contends with Eurocentric frames that push materials into anthropology or religion rather than “theatre.” Play discovery remains challenging: cataloging rarely enables browsing by practitioners’ actual access points—theme, playwright demographics, historical setting. Eurocentrism persists not only in who appears in standard histories, but in the very definitions of “theatre” those histories assume.

Meeting these needs demands subject expertise most LIS curricula barely touch. These studies, combined with my observations, illuminate where library frameworks don’t yet align with creative research processes:

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Gaps Between Traditional Library Models and Performing Arts Research

  • Performance as research. Artists don’t separate research from creation—performance itself generates knowledge. Traditional library models assume research precedes creation; systems do not yet account for knowledge emerging through practice.
  • Embodied knowledge. Academic and library frameworks often do not recognize bodily practice, kinesthetic learning, or experiential understanding as legitimate forms of research and knowledge generation.
  • Community expertise. Students focus on lived experience alongside published scholarship. Traditional hierarchies that privilege formal publications can undermine the legitimacy of community-based work.
  • Non-linear processes. Creative research is recursive and is frequently characterized by strong emotions. One-shot library instruction focuses on systematic searching. This often misses intuitive leaps and unexpected connections.
  • Visual information primacy. Artists across disciplines rely on visual representations, creating image “morgues” for research. Text-based discovery systems don’t yet serve visual searching well.
  • Serendipity over efficiency. Artists value browsing and accidental discoveries as sources of inspiration. When plays collocate with novels and poetry, or scores scatter across classifications, browsing becomes challenging. Library systems optimize for known-item retrieval, creating tension with exploratory investigation.
  • Interdisciplinary navigation. Students investigating trauma draw simultaneously on psychology, neuroscience, performance studies, and feminist theory. Disciplinary call number organization scatters related materials across locations.
  • Ephemeral materials. Theatre requires an understanding of materials that are “instantaneously past”—social, political, and artistic contexts and creative processes that disappear without documentation.

The Dalal and Shane Model: A Practical Approach

Fortunately, Dalal and Shane’s collaboration demonstrates several principles applicable to broader performing arts librarianship:

  • Sustained embedded partnerships rather than one-shot sessions. Developing evaluation sophistication, strategic approaches, and comfort with ambiguity takes years of practice. Mayer found that students who missed classes or transferred stayed behind. This shows that front-loading alone isn’t enough.
  • Peer learning occurs through practice rather than abstract instruction. Students build a “critical eye” by talking about real research choices and learning from their mistakes. Students develop intuitive judgment alongside analytical skills.
  • The need for explicit visual and primary source literacy teaching. 
  • Recognition of legitimate differences. Framing creative research as distinctive rather than deficient validates the sophisticated behaviors that Fleming-May and Marini document. 
  • Ongoing feedback and adaptation. By embedding themselves in courses and providing non-graded comments on individual submissions, Dalal and Shane offered point-of-need instruction. When they shifted to flipped classrooms with collaborative in-class research, “collaboration and source-sharing improved outcomes and reduced anxiety” (3).

Challenges and Ongoing Conversations

However, implementing these approaches faces significant challenges, particularly for tenure-track librarians in these specializations:

Within libraries: How do we prioritize sustained embedded relationships when staffing is limited? How do we assess impacts beyond traditional counts? How do we build subject expertise when LIS programs don’t teach it? Sustained partnerships, proactive documentation, and creative programming require resources many libraries lack.

For tenure and promotion: How do we make cases when creative research support doesn’t fit established categories? Stone notes the shift toward generalists means broader subject coverage, yet evaluation criteria remain designed for specialists or generalists—not hybrid positions requiring deep expertise across multiple performing arts.

Between libraries and academic units: How do we partner with faculty who may not recognize libraries as collaborators in practice-based research? The tension between desired sources and realistic resources means librarians must educate faculty about expectations while advocating for improved collections.

Professional infrastructure: We need more interconnected communities of practice like those music and art librarians have established. The Theatre Library Association (founded 1937) exists but remains largely inactive.

Training and standards: How do we advocate for specialized training in practice-based research? ARLIS/NA Core Competencies call for understanding users’ “research behaviors” and “visual literacy,” but no comparable framework spans music, dance, and theatre together. No specialized educational program for performing arts archivists and librarians matches film archivist training.

Community engagement: Prioritizing materials from BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and historically marginalized creators requires transparent stewardship models and long-term commitment. How do we balance proactive documentation with ethical engagement that doesn’t extract or appropriate?

Moving Forward: What This Means for Practice

Taken together, these studies argue for reconceptualizing library practice across many domains:

  • Information literacy. Shift from one-off sessions to embedded, semester-long partnerships that blend deliberate practice with ongoing feedback. Teach visual and primary-source literacies explicitly; treat creative research as distinctive rather than deficient; address strategic information avoidance as a legitimate professional boundary; emphasize synthesis and argumentation alongside tool mechanics; and confirm embodied ways of knowing as part of inquiry.
  • Collections & discovery. Foreground visual browsing invites serendipity, supports robust multimedia search, and proactively documents ephemeral performance. In practice, build thematic (not only disciplinary) pathways for discovering plays; furnish designers with heterogeneous formats (such as photographs, ephemera, pattern books, and technical manuals); surface increasingly interdisciplinary sources for dance; and collect popular/non-scholarly sources when they best serve creative work.
  • Reference & research support. Develop deep subject expertise—including knowledge of creative practice. As Marini shows, this often emerges through practitioner backgrounds, sustained engagement with performances, or targeted study—not LIS training alone.
  • Archives & collection development. Adopt proactive—rather than reactive—approaches. Following Marini, “promote the creation of sources” by arranging recordings, soliciting documentation, and engaging artists during their processes. Stone describes symposia that teach dance companies fundamental archival practices to preserve ephemeral work. This challenges traditional neutrality, but the ephemerality of performance makes intervention necessary; without it, evidence disappears.
  • Professional development and evaluation. Recognize performing arts librarianship as specialized expertise even when roles span multiple disciplines. Build competencies through ongoing learning, practitioner engagement, and institutional support.

The Specialization Question

Stone’s data reveal a striking trend: between 2009 and 2016, MLA members not solely focusing on music increased from 31% to 40%—a 9% shift in seven years. This acceleration toward generalist positions reflects budget constraints that make specialists seem inefficient, pressures to “do more with less,” and assumptions that information literacy skills transfer seamlessly across disciplines.

Yet paradoxically, the work demands deeper specialization. Mastering dance knowledge, visual skills for theatre design, community research methods, and archival documentation requires years of practice. The result: a professional identity crisis. Are we generalists serving the performing arts, specialists spanning multiple disciplines, or something neither framework describes?

For tenure-track librarians, this tension is acute. Traditional evaluation rewards either deep specialization or broad excellence. Hybrid roles must prove both: generalist flexibility and specialist competence. Current frameworks rarely account for that duality.

The irony is stark: the interdisciplinary nature of performing arts often requires more specialized expertise, not less. Supporting a dance scholar exploring trauma and embodiment involves performance studies, psychology, neuroscience, somatics, and feminist theory—far more epistemically varied than guiding a chemistry student to journals. This isn’t about “different databases.” It’s about how practice produces knowledge, how to evaluate embodied evidence, when strategic information avoidance is appropriate, and how community knowledge interacts with scholarly sources.

Proactive documentation depends on relationships built over time—impossible through transactional, generalist reference. Closing representation gaps requires community history, trust-building, and culturally responsive practice. Visual and primary-source literacy demand specialized pedagogy—the sustained, embedded collaboration Dalal and Shane demonstrate. Flexibility alone cannot deliver this.

Making the Case for Expertise in an Era of Generalization

How, then, do we make the case institutionally? Casting generalist breadth as “transferable skills” rarely satisfies promotion committees or honors the depth of expertise required. The question may be less “specialist or generalist?” than whether we need new frameworks that recognize boundary-spanning expertise anchored in deep disciplinary knowledge. Music librarianship built such infrastructure over decades; theatre and dance have not received equivalent investment. Building it now will require long-term advocacy—or a redefinition of specialization itself when disciplines are inadequate to the work.

For now, many of us are improvising hybrid practices while documenting their impact in promotion-readable ways: publishing on the epistemology of creative research, presenting at library and performing arts venues, developing adoptable frameworks, leading professional initiatives, and evidencing sustained intellectual partnerships beyond service statistics. We argue—often from positions titled “generalist”—that the work requires specialized expertise.

The structural contradiction remains: institutions want flexibility and efficiency; the work demands long-term, deep engagement. Until evaluation criteria recognize hybrid expertise—or positions are re-scoped to acknowledge it—individual librarians will continue bearing the burden of reconciling incompatible expectations.

Conclusion

The professionalization gap in performing arts librarianship beyond music creates both challenges and opportunities. We can build frameworks that recognize creative research on its own terms—including performance as research, embodied knowledge, affective experience, community-based practice, and non-linear processes.

What does this mean in practice? For those of us in tenure-track positions, advocating that supporting creative research forms scholarly work deserving of promotion and advancement is essential. Moreover, it means publishing not only about collections or instructional methods, but also about epistemological questions: What is research? How is knowledge generated? What role do libraries play in creative and community-based inquiry?

Fleming-May’s meta-ethnography reveals that creative information behavior differs fundamentally from academic models. Marini demonstrates that performing arts specialists who share characteristics with the scholars they serve can function as true research partners. Mayer documents that students cannot intuit the skills their work requires. Dalal and Shane prove that sustained, practice-based, collaborative approaches can bridge these gaps. Stone illuminates the breadth of support needs across theatre and dance, from play discovery to interdisciplinary collection development to emerging technologies.

Together, these studies provide evidence-based foundations for reconceptualizing performing arts library practice. The work ahead includes turning insights into action, building support systems, and advocating for resources. That future requires us to question traditional models, build new frameworks, engage in ongoing conversations across institutions and disciplines, and commit to supporting creative research with sophistication and resources.

I am most hopeful when I see the library function as a living partner in the creative process—alive to context and generous with curiosity.

References