My ARLIS2015 Recap

ARLIS/NA in Fort Worth was rainy, warm (to a Canadian), and gorgeous (because I like abandoned buildings). I took on some volunteer duties for the conference, the first of which was to go on a fantastic walking tour of the city!

The conference itself, of course, was inspiring and informative. Because I have stopped taking actual notes and only live-tweet now, I’ll basically be reading back through those and trying to expand on things that are most important (if you know me, you know those topics are copyright, access, digitization, and weird formats).

First session: opening up your images to greater (more, better) use.

According to Anne Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions, Indianapolis Museum of Art, administrative costs actually went way down when images were opened up for unencumbered use. (Given that most staff are overburdened anyways, this wouldn’t be due to salary cuts.) Once a large enough collection of open content went online, the remaining efforts were put towards digitization-by-request for researchers. Charging a flat rate for the custom service has apparently gone off pretty well, with researchers understanding and respecting the necessity (by copyright law, at least in Canada, you can’t charge more than the actual cost of the labour and materials needed to make the reproduction).

The Durationator, as elaborated upon by Elizabeth Townsend Gard, is a copyright tool that will help you evaluate the rights status of a work with as little information as possible — ideally, just the country, type of work, and date of creation. We’ve had a few forms of this in the past (see my Emerging Tech Forum presentation from last year’s ARLIS for examples of sliders, flowcharts, and interactive decision-helpers) but this is both a package service (as in, input your entire collection data) and relies on the work of quite a few law students and law-experience researchers. Not sure how much it costs, and why there isn’t a small-batch-for-free service for individuals / testers / etc., but it’s early days yet! (You can sign up to be a beta-tester on their site.)

I’m not usually into instruction, but I have found all of the IL Framework discussion really interesting. I was so glad to see someone implementing it in art instruction sessions (which has its own interesting set of information-seeking needs to control for):

The session about our labours with working artists covered everything from running a visual-resources centre at the NYPL …

… to working as a private archivist for a famous artist — and Claire Kennedy (archivist / librarian to John Baldessari) let us in on the usual course of things when it comes to private/personal archives:

I’m, of course, more invested in the archives side of things, and I’m always concerned with what happens to stuff before it gets donated. There’s so much dreary nonsense in records management that needs to be gussied up and spread about as common knowledge, just to be sure people aren’t, I dunno, dumping thousands of governmental emails they think have no value …. With artists, I’m even more compelled to make sure nobody’s purging any materials before they get into the hands of a trained appraiser.

Saturday, of course, was full of our own ArLiSNAP events, from our general meeting to the open discussion session (which I am so thankful you all came to!) — as well as the Canadian general meeting — so I won’t share too many details. (I’ll be printing up some results and recommendations from the open discussion another time.)

Sunday started with, in Secrecy in the Archives, a twenty-minute-long mic-drop presentation from heather ahtone:

The session on weird-media-collections didn’t go too in-depth on cataloguing, preservation, and access, but it was a great cross-cut view of cool initiatives.

The Linked Open Data session featured our own Sarah Seymore talking about the U Oregon collections. It was almost *too* informative.

The big finale, for me, was not the beautiful reception at the Kimbell, but seeing the CAA Fair Use Best Practices discussion.

But here are some photos of us partying at the Renzo Piano Pavilion, anyways. (And our new moderator, Tiffany!)

(Also I took some snaps for Librarian Wardrobe too.)

So that’s it! My trip to lovely Fort Worth and my time spent trying to do way too many things at once. And now, back to migrating the ArLiSNAP blog …

Announcing the ArLiSNAP Discussion Session! 

ArLiSNAP is offering a dedicated space at the 2015 Annual Conference for students and new professionals to discuss current events and issues that matter to us.

ArLiSNAP on Facebook

ARLIS/NA Annual Conference – Early Registration Deadline is approaching!

If you haven’t registered for the ARLIS annual conference yet, make sure you do so before February 5th! After the 5th, registration fees increase by $100 for regular members.

February 5th is also the deadline for booking rooms at the discounted rate for the conference hotel.

*Note: for all students, whether you are a member or not, the registration fee does not increase after February 5th; this increase applies only to regular members. Read more here.

Hope to see you all there!

Texas-Mexico Chapter Fall Meeting – Student Award Announcement

Applications Due: Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The ARLIS/NA Texas-Mexico Chapter is pleased to announce our first annual Student Award, generously funded by Eric Wolf, Head Librarian at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This award covers both the ARLIS/NA student membership dues of $50 along with the local chapter dues of $10 for one year, beginning in the fall of 2014 and gives the new member a financial incentive to attend the local chapter annual meeting in Orange, Texas. At the 2013 annual meeting in San Antonio, members of the local chapter acknowledged their responsibility to future art librarians. By granting this award, we intend to encourage student involvement in the Art Libraries Society of North America not only on a national level but, as importantly, on a local chapter level.

This is a big year for Texas! Our local chapter will have its annual meeting in Orange from October 17 through 19, 2014 where the Stark Museum, a southeast Texas gem, will open its doors to us. From March 19 through 23, 2015, the 43^rd Annual ARLIS/NA Conference will take place in Fort Worth. As a student member of ARLIS/NA and the ARLIS/NA Texas-Mexico Chapter, you can experience the professional development side of your future career in all types of art libraries and see important works of art and architecture in cities across the United States and Canada by attending these conferences or simply accessing the following websites: ARLIS/NA and ARLIS/NA Texas-Mexico Chapter.

The award committee urges all students with interest and need to apply; we especially encourage first-time conference attendees. To meet the primary requirement, applicants must lack full institutional funding. Apply for the Student Award by submitting a letter of application and a curriculum vitae to the Award Committee chair Lynn Wexler atlwexler@mfah.org. The letter must include a statement of qualification and your proposed conference program involvement.

The deadline for applications is Wednesday, September 24, 2014. The award committee will announce the winner on Wednesday, October 1, 2014. Direct all inquiries to the 2014 Award Committee chair: Lynn Wexler, lwexler@mfah.org, (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). Other members of the 2014 committee are Beth Dodd (University of Texas, Austin) and Joel Pelanne (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).