Deirdre E. Donohue

I am an artist, educator and librarian 38 years into a grand experiment of always doing what I love.

I am privileged to be the Assistant Director of the New York Public Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

 Previously, I was privileged to be the Stephanie Shuman Director of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections at the International Center of Photography, and adjunct faculty at Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Sciences and the ICP/Bard MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies. In the interstitial time, I have and continue to read as voraciously as possible, and embroider and collage my way through vast, un-realizable art projects.

I worked in New York City museums for over 30 years in many roles, witnessing the great evolution of the definitions & deployments of the terms "library," "archive," and "museum" in those years. The resulting stew is the one that I endeavor to enter into a dialog about with students in graduate programs of Library Science and Fine Arts. I thoroughly enjoy the ensuing conversation, and continue to learn a tremendous amount from it. That harvest is, in turn, plowed back in to propagate the foregoing activities on the job.

While not anything like a "digital native," I optimistically consider myself a willing and ever-curious analog refugee. The books The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright and In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy inspired a pronounced shift in my thinking about the future of information science, and how the creative practices of librarians are now, more than ever, the connective tissue for how we live and are informed.