As an academic librarian, I’ve collaborated with a number of Georgia Tech faculty members to design, curate, build, and install exhibits of classwork in the library. These exhibits have ranged from poster sessions to book fairs to museum-style art collections to a full-size treehouse installed on a fake tree.

The process of transforming a class into an exhibit is always interesting and frustrating: interesting because it is as if we are publishing the class in artifacts, and frustrating because of the limits of time, technical ability, and resources. There is no clear mission or plan for the library to recruit, develop, and archive these exhibits.

I’d like to lead a discussion of how creative and intellectual output in academic classes is exhibited and archived — successes, failures, expectations, utopian visions of library support services (physical and virtual), why this is like publishing, why this is unlike publishing, and of course metadata.