As this year’s Lois Swan Jones Award recipient I was able to attend my first professional conference. Currently I’m a student at the iSchool at UT-Austin where I’ve been focusing on archives and museum studies. I work in the photography archives at the Harry Ransom Center, and I hope in my future career to work as an art museum librarian and as a visual materials archivist. The ArLis/NA conference showed me the many career possibilities even within the field of art librarianship, which was very exciting to discover as someone entering the field.

I started the conference bright and early on Friday morning by attending the Bloomington Treasures Tour. A small group of us visited the University of Indiana Campus and toured the Kinsey Institute, the Lilly Library, the Fine Arts building, and the IU Art Museum. We saw some of Thomas Hart Benton’s murals in situ in the theater and a couple murals undergoing conservation treatment in the Museum’s labs. This tour was a wonderful opportunity to see some great architecture (the Museum was designed by I. M. Pei), interesting objects (such as the puzzle collection at the Lilly Library), and shocking art (everything at the Kinsey Institute!). It was also refreshing to visit a campus with such a strong commitment to the arts. Later that evening, the First-Time Attendees Orientation, Convocation and Welcome party at the Eiteljorg Museum were all great ways to learn about the Society and meet colleagues.

Saturday and Sunday were both overwhelming days, full of lots of new information and perspectives on the field. In the Opening Plenary, James Neal of Columbia University spoke about new contextual trends—Web 2.0 technologies and mass collaboration, self-service and customization, restructuring and de-formalization. He stressed the need for research and development to understand creation of new knowledge, marketing the library, and rethinking the library space as a more dynamic, social, and collaborative environment. Then, I attended the Museum Division Meeting which presented some innovative online cataloging systems from a few art museums around the country, including the NYARC catalogue which is a combined system for the Frick, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA and the Met.

“The Evolving Art Librarian” session presented a few perspectives on how the role of the art librarian is changing. All four speakers mentioned that there is a growing emphasis on management and administrative duties. While there is also a growing need to use more 2.0 technologies, there is a lack of training or time to learn it. Collection development remains an important duty, especially in the areas of “non-traditional” materials (almost everything seems “non-traditional” anymore) and digital content.

Presenters at “Discovery on this Side of the Virtual Wall: Evolving Authority Control Resources and Techniques in the Digital Age” discussed maintaining responsibility for the resources librarians create. The most interesting part of this session, I found, was Susan Chun’s presentation of www.steve.museum which is an organization that promotes social tagging of online museum collections. The group’s research shows that 88% of tags (in their sample) were useful and 86% were not duplicates of words found in the objects’ metadata. This organization not only researches the effectiveness of tags but provides software and support for museums to implement it for their online collections.

On Sunday, the speakers for “Working Together, Working Better: Liaison Relationships for Art, Architecture, and Visual Resources” offered advice for maintaining the importance and visibility of the art librarian in the eyes of others (i.e. faculty and administration). They all agreed that librarians’ practices should change from collection-focused to user-oriented. Some successful methods presented were: collaborating with faculty on projects; meeting with new faculty and actively maintaining those relationships; having an office in the art department rather than main library; creating a blog for the art department with faculty, students and staff as guest bloggers; auditing classes; collecting syllabi for art department classes; creating physical and virtual exhibitions; and posting lectures and how-to videos on YouTube. Generally, they argued that making your presence as the art librarian very well known fosters greater use and appreciation of the art library.

“Off the Wall: Photography Beyond Aesthetics” was of particular interest to me as I currently work in a photography archives. The speakers were a photography historian, museum curator, and art historian and they offered different perspectives on art libraries than presented in other sessions. They all emphasized the importance of collecting photography for a variety of reasons, from artistic merit to historical evidentiary value, and they urged the audience as art librarians to collect as much photography as possible. This session made me wonder how many art libraries also foray into collecting photography, or other original works, as an archives or museum would?

“Visual Literacy: What, Why How?” was the last session I attended on Sunday before the wonderful Circle City Celebration at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (a great museum, if only we had been able to visit all of it!). Speakers discussed the importance of understanding visual literacy—both the reception of and communication with images—especially in light of studies which prove that students today are cognitively different than those of the past. Though visual literacy is most often linked with art, it is a skill useful across many fields. The speakers encouraged art librarians to promote visual literacy and make this a central part of their jobs.

On Monday, the Membership Meeting breakfast introduced many outgoing and upcoming board members, highlighted other ArLis/NA events, such as European study tours, and provided a preview of next year’s conference in Boston. I attended one more session before the Closing Plenary. Speakers in “Where Libraries and Archives Converge: Artists Files” discussed the difficulty of providing access to holdings of archival and ephemeral materials about artists, but offered insights from a few initiatives. For example, the Artist Files Online Directory at arlisna.org will provide (when it launches) a listing of libraries and repositories around the country with artist files available, and the digitization project of artist files at the Guggenheim (also yet to launch) showed how digitization can be an easy way to provide access to off-site materials. At the Closing Plenary, Brian Payne of the Central Indiana Community Foundation spoke of his work to transform the city of Indianapolis into a more creative, engaging, and enjoyable city. He has worked to make it a liveable city in part through supporting public arts programs. His talk gave me hope that communities in this country are realizing the importance of the arts and creating environments to foster creativity.

My conference weekend felt jam-packed and exhausting, but it was lots of fun and very enlightening. I again would like to thank the Texas-Mexico chapter for the award which allowed me to attend. The conference helped me realize that I have much to look forward to in my future career.

Submitted by Nicole Davis 5/20/09