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Editorial: Special Edition

Welcome to this special edition of the Journal of Adult and Continuing Education on arts and culture institutions. As the first of its kind, this volume makes a unique contribution to a growing body of literature on the arts, culture and adult education by highlighting critical sites – museums and libraries of nonformal and informal adult education and learning that have been historically undertheorised and underresearched. Contributors to this volume include university professors and students, as well as librarians from Canada, England, and the United States. Institutions that promote arts and culture, as we know them today, are expressions of the eighteenth century, but over the past five decades in particular they have come to play increasingly vital sociocultural roles. These institutions, particularly museums, archives, and libraries, conserve and preserve visual and written narratives, celebrate aesthetic experience, provide services and resources, support economic development, define history and culture, and offer what Martin (2002) calls ‘extraordinary opportunities for recreation and enjoyment’. Importantly in today’s complex and problematic neoliberal milieu of privatisation, commoditisation, and pragmatism, arts and cultural institutions embody a critical ‘public’ ethos – of public access, engagement, and exchange – and demand that we not only legitimize, but actively engage with culture and the arts. Arts and cultural institutions are also key players in community education and learning. As the demand for knowledge and information grows and as social and cultural inequities keep pace, the educational and educative roles played by arts and cultural institutions and by arts-based education in general becomes ever more vital. Yet these sites, as many of the authors in this volume discuss, are not unproblematic. There remain ambiguities about educational roles and meanings, tensions around knowledge and history, challenges around inclusion and voice, as well as myriad complex and often contradictory practices. In the first article in this volume,Darlene Clover, Kathy Sanford and Bruno de Oliveira Jayme utilize a content analysis to explore commonalities and differences in museum and library education research published in peer-reviewed publications over a 60-year period. In spite of a substantial increase in critical commentary on the education work of museums and libraries and a popular ideal