Mark Pompelia

Mark Pompelia started at RISD in 2010 as the Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design’s visual and material resource librarian. Here he oversees non-text collections that include a 40,000-item material samples collection and a growing consortium of member colleges and universities with a shared database viewable at materialorder.org, digital image subscriptions and the half million-item picture collection, and the school’s institutional repository on Digital Commons, which now holds nearly 30,000 files.

Pompelia received a bachelor’s degree in History of Art from The Ohio State University (OSU) and a master’s degree in Library Science from Kent State University. He started his career at OSU before leaving for Rice University, where he spent a decade before coming to RISD.

Pompelia is active in the Art Libraries Society of North America and Visual Resources Association and participates consistently in those organizations’ conferences, as well as meetings of related organizations, including international affiliates. He is the co-author of a chapter on materials libraries included in the second edition of the Handbook of Art and Design Librarianship (2017)—the first to include materials collections in librarianship.

In 2019 Pompelia spoke on materials collections at the “Community Catalysts”-themed OCLC Library Futures conference. In October 2022 in Munich he will resume an in-person conference presentation on the shared materials catalogue project with a focus on the database as discovery tool and potential for metadata standard.

In 2020 Pompelia received promotion to the highest rank of librarianship at RISD. He recently completed his term as ARLIS/NA president (2021-22), continues as past president on the executive board until the April 2023 conference in Mexico City.