“Untitled” by Unknown Artist:

NYC Health + Hospitals is a hospital system that has one of the largest public art collections in North America. It is a collection, however, that has been plagued by administrative difficulties, and it exhibits problems due to its distributed nature and its location in active medical facilities. These problems mean that best practices for cataloging visual resources are often sadly unachievable. By using less conventional techniques (or “pretty good practices”), however, the cataloger can obtain quality metadata by thinking around problems that would otherwise be prohibitive. [This article is an expansion of a paper presented at the 52nd annual ARLIS/NA conference held in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in April 2024, as part of the session “New Voices in the Profession.”]