Contemporary society is dominated by visual communication, yet visual literacy is a learned skill that requires training. Gender issues, particularly the subjects of gender diversity and power struggles, are deeply pertinent to today’s visual culture. The critical consumption of information has long been taught in libraries, though instruction has typically prioritized text-based sources. However, visual literacy instruction has the capacity to provoke critical inquiry into issues of gender, race, social class, and ethnicity. As institutions that promote social justice, libraries can help improve diversity and inclusion in their communities through teaching visual literacy skills at all levels. Critical visual literacy instruction can also help academic libraries advance student scholarship, which can only be achieved if they are literate in all forms of knowledge production.
While there has been notable progress in indigenous-led initiatives related to visual representation, issues of access and misrepresentation still exist and require ongoing advocacy work. In the virtual space, libraries, archives, and museums have an opportunity to increase decolonization efforts through wider dissemination of these images, improved dynamic presentation tools, and better organization of their collections. Nonetheless, online spaces come with their own challenges related to intellectual property ethics, the digital divide, and funding. This article examines issues of representation, organization, and access to digital images, and the role of visual literacy in libraries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.