Category is… The Women's Art Library: Queering metadata with the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing

The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) is an ethical, open source, artist-driven database of artist books and publications. DAAP recently received Heritage Lottery Funding to support the Women's Art Library (WAL) to build their own archives on the platform. Through a series of workshops, tutorials and drop-ins, artists represented in the WAL generated anecdotal, ‘gossipy’ histories which act as access points to artists’ books that may be out of print, limited in availability within institutional or public archives or libraries, or shared digitally for the first time. I will draw on a selection of records – an archive of examples – from the Women's Art Library on the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing to show how the database evolves in response to artists’ needs. These gorgeous, unruly catalogue records trouble, disrupt and bend metadata for queer use. 1