ArLiS: Thursday, March 24

Well, readers, it’s a blog post from Jason – gasp! What august event caused me to sit down and write another post? The short answer is that I just returned from the 2011 ArLiS/NA+VRA annual conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As you can imagine the conference put lots of new thoughts and ideas into my head, ones which I want to share with you here. In thinking over the past few days how I wanted to share my experiences and reflections with you, and I think (as librarian extraordinaire Erin Dorney does) I will do it on a day by day basis, with some overall thoughts and reflections at the end.

And, as it is brief, allow me to start with my first day, Thursday, March 24th. As I was travelling part of the day, I arrived about noon, and ran to my first session at one. It was wild, as when I left Arkansas, it was mild (in the 50’s) and Minneapolis had 24 inches of snow the previous day, and it was about 15 degrees outside. Brr!
The first session I attended was the Book Arts Special Interest Group, which I wanted to attend because the program stated they would be discussing issues related to the cataloging of artists’ books, an area where I need to expand my professional knowledge. Yuki Hibben and Mary Anne Dyer from Virginia Commonwealth University shared a “preview” of their poster session on Sunday morning, which I will share more about in the post for Sunday. They have gone into some great exploration about best practice for cataloging and promoting access to artists’ books through the catalog through a locally created controlled vocabulary. They shared some information, which (as I said before) I will share in my post about Sunday. In addition, several members of the group spoke about the creation of surrogates for the different (and fascinating) bindings used in the book arts – which seems to be a great idea. These surrogates allow the user to be “rough” with the binding and really see how it is made without endangering the actual handmade bindings in the collection.

The nest session was the Artist Files Working Group where I ran into Sam Duncan, Library Director at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. It was wonderful to see Sam! In this session, I learned about the awesome project that has been in the care of the group for the past several years, a website called Artist Files Revealed: Online Directory, which is just incredible. I plan on contributing to the directory, as well as examining their MARC record recommendations in-depth. This was the first “golden nugget” I came away from the conference with. Also discussed were methods for archiving born-digital ephemeral materials for artists’ files. The first tool discussed was Archive It, a tool provided by the Internet Archive (a group that’s getting a great deal of attention in ArLiS circles, for good reason). Attendees highlighted that it was an easy to use tool for collecting the born-digital ephemeral items (note: what constitutes ephemeral on the internet?), if it was carefully managed and curated. It requires a great deal of attention to function to your needs, and other, simpler, tools suggested where Archive This, Decapod, and Endnote. Archive This is a simpler implementation of the Archive It tool, and might be a viable alternative. The National Gallery of Art uses Endnote, which I am sure many of you are familiar with. Some institutions tried, and did not like, Decapod. For me the question arose – where does one store and preserve this digital content? How do you integrate it into the paper based artists’ files collection?

In the same room as the Artist files group, and directly following it was the Cataloging Issues Discussion Group, my first “real” cataloging session of the conference. There was, naturally, a great deal of discussion about the new cataloging rules, RDA, and their implementation in art libraries. The full presentation about RDA happened on Sunday, which I will talk about in that day’s post. There was also some discussion around the Getty’s new thesaurus, CONA (Cultural Objects Name Authority) and discussion about VRA’s Cataloging Cultural Objects manual. Of particular interest to me is the nascent VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File), a “mashup” of headings and controlled vocabularies from all over the world. It needs some work, but looks like it might develop into a widely-used and implemented tool for authority control. Finally, Julia Wisniewski from the Library of Congress invited us to participate in a program to contribute CIP (cataloging in publication) records for ourselves, rather than having LC do it on our behalf. I am really interested in this, and excited to find out more from Julia.

My final session on Friday was the Cataloging Advisory Committee (see a theme developing?), headed by Sherman Clarke. In this meeting, Sherman and the other members discussed the creation of an “examples” guide, contrasting the differences between AACR2 and RDA in an art environment. I think this is going to be incredibly helpful as we catalogers move into the new standards realm, and it will also help art catalogers to focus our input into the final stages of development of RDA. I really enjoyed meeting Sherman, as well as Meg Black, one of the catalogers at the Met.

I wrapped up Thursday by going to the opening plenary about copyright, then attended the Founder’s Fete Fundraiser at the Gale Mansion. I ran into Chia-Chun Shih from the Kimbell (who it was great to see) and met some new people. It was packed in there, though – the crowd flow was not very good, and it was unclear where the food and presentation were. After returning (with no dinner and few snacks) I sat down with Milan Hughston from MoMA, who I “knew” through Sam and Mary Jane at the Carter. Milan is great, and I am glad to know him!
It was a busy day, and I was so exhausted when I got back to my hotel room. Stay tuned for my post about Friday!