Most people usually spend Mondays slowly winding up for work after a weekend. However, at the National Library building, some librarians found themselves winding down early with a cup of tea on 22 January. On that windy Monday afternoon, 17 librarians, curators and professors, from art and design schools and museums, gathered informally for a tea session hosted by the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library (LKCRL).

The purpose of the event was to provide a single platform for visual art and design-related libraries in Singapore to connect with each other and chat for the first time on art library issues. Participants could then discover ways to tap on each other’s strengths, and work together to tackle shared concerns.

The invited institutions included the Asian Civilisations Museum, LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Nanyang Polytechnic, NTU School of Art, Design and Media, Raffles Design Institute, Singapore Art Museum and Temasek Polytechnic. Five librarians working with the LKCRL’s visual arts collection also participated.

After a lively one-hour discussion, the group got to know each other’s arty pursuits and found common concerns such as retrospective collecting, creating information literacy programmes and promoting arts databases to the quirky art/design students. The event ended on an encouraging note, with a sumptuous tea of sandwiches, cream puffs and assorted dim sum at the National Library’s fifth-floor garden courtyard. At the end, the group agreed that the next step was to brainstorm for solutions to shared issues. This would take place in a future meeting planned for April to June.

Contributed by Alicia Yeo, Lee Kong Chian Reference Library NLB