VRA 2022 Baltimore

*This workshop is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

AAUW Work Smart / EAC Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Salary Negotiation

Join the Equitable Action Committee for a workshop on Salary Negotiation. As an extension of our Cash Rules Everything Around Me series, this workshop will discuss salary negotiation, why it is important and provide step-by-step salary negotiation training designed to help colleagues in our field gain skills and confidence to own their worth. In the first half of the session, an AAUW representative will lead a Work Smart Salary Negotiation workshop. The second half will allow users to practice their negotiation skills and discuss the information they learned in small breakout room groups.

*This workshop is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference and is capped at 30 participants. Sign up when you register for the conference or email info@vraweb.org with questions.*

The workshop is fully enrolled. If you sign up after 3/7/22 you will be added to the wait-list.

*This session is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

During the past year, the “Great Resignation” (aka. The “Big Quit”) has roiled the world of employment nationwide in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had already caused job losses among our membership. While many institutions and individuals now hope for a “return to normal,” others anticipate that the past two years mark a watershed necessitating further transformational changes in the years ahead. These larger employment trends have come on top of quantum shifts in the visual resources field itself, as traditional tasks give way to new responsibilities, and siloed image collections are replaced by interdisciplinary projects.
For several years, our annual conferences have featured the perspectives of newer professionals in “Stories from the Start.” Looking at the opposite ends of their career arcs, this session brings together the perspectives and experiences of two pre-pandemic retirees, two of our members who made their decisions to retire during the past year, and two currently active professionals whose retirements are pending in the near future. When and why did they make their decisions to retire? What was/is the actual process? Concerns? What comes next after we leave our offices for the last time?

Organizer/Moderator:
Allan T. Kohl, Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Speakers:
Virginia (Macie) Hall, formerly Johns Hopkins University
Christina Updike, formerly James Madison University
Marcia Focht, formerly Binghamton University
Rebecca Moss, formerly University of Minnesota
Steven Kowalik, Hunter College/CUNY
Jenni Rodda, Institute of Fine Arts/NYU

*This session is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

We are thrilled to announce exciting new plans for updating and enhancing the VRA Core schema and CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects). The new VRA Core 5 schema will include built-in support for accessibility (including alt text data and actionable links), as well as GIS references. A 2nd edition of CCO is being written including those topics, as well as addressing issues of equity and inclusivity in cataloging. Both CCO and the VRA Core schema, and all documentary materials, are being reviewed for equity and inclusion as well. As an outgrowth of these endeavors, a free, distributed database/cataloging tool is being planned to serve as an exemplar of VRA Core 5 and CCO in action. Please join us to learn about this project, and for Q&A; we look forward to your input!

*This workshop is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

How can accessibility be extended to digital collection systems and catalog records for search and discovery? We are excited to introduce the updated VRA Core 5, which demonstrates how to build in and store accessibility data. Part of the project will also include a database tool that will show how this is done, and export alt text and other types of accessibility data. The workshop will cover:

• Tools for checking and testing accessibility; demonstration of various screen readers
• How to crowdsource alt text descriptions with Zooniverse (how to use the tool, create a project)
• Going beyond descriptions to other forms of accessibility support (indicating hazards, support for non-English languages), and different item (media) types (film and video, tagged PDFs)
• How to create actionable, accessible links (URIs); navigation and color issues with system interfaces
• What forms of accessibility can be triggered by stored data values, and what accessibility features remain system-based
• Demonstration of the free database tool and discussion of working with vendors

*This session is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

A Profile of Description Specialists in Inclusive Description Work And/Or Initiatives
Treshani Perera

This paper presents research in progress and initial findings from a study investigating the education, work experiences, and demographics of description specialists involved in inclusive description work and/or initiatives. The researcher defines description specialists as Library and Information Science (LIS) workers in the following categories: catalogers (including copy catalogers), metadata librarians, archivists providing description, and other LIS workers who provide description as 50% or more of their work hours. Data collected through a mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) research survey hopes to represent description specialists globally and provide insight into their educational, work, and lived experiences; motivations behind projects and initiatives highlighting inclusive description; project categories and priorities; trainings and reading resources assisting their inclusive description work; and challenges encountered while engaging in inclusive description work.

This presentation and research findings will be useful to LIS workers (including students) interested in inclusive description and/or currently planning projects and initiatives prioritizing inclusive description. The presenter hopes that research findings will also be useful to supervisors and administrators looking to empower employees providing inclusive description and support related projects and/or initiatives in various types of LIS work settings.

What’s So Special About an Artist’s Archive?
Malia Van Heukelem

This case study of a large artist archive at a medium sized academic research library will connect the success of the artist serving as his own archivist and the collection's broad research appeal locally, nationally and internationally. Like many artists, there is so much more than his own work represented. There is correspondence, fine art prints, ephemera of other artists and writers hidden in the collection. The foundation of organization is in place; now the focus is on creating online access points through finding aids and image collections. The presentation will explore the use of ArchivesSpace, Omeka, and other software to increase access. It will also demonstrate how a solo archivist can leverage interns, student assistants, and volunteers for collections management projects that benefit both the institutional priorities and desired learning outcomes. This talk will delve into the challenges of 20th century visual resource collections such as copyright and engagement with donors. Featuring a local artist has brought other art and architecture collections to the library, without clear boundaries which has led to questions of sustainability, who and what is collected. There is definitely a need to balance the historical record and yet, there are already more archival collections accessioned than can be responsibly managed by one person. The primary collection does include works by women and artists of color, yet much descriptive work remains to forefront the diversity contained within. As an archivist and librarian at a public university, there are many competing demands for collections management, support of researchers, and instruction plus the added interest for exhibition loans and the desire for other artists and architects to be represented. This artist archive is both interesting and complex.

*This session is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

The Museum Collections Management Commons project is a multi-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by Five Colleges, Incorporated to plan for the future of a shared museum collections management system (CMS) and its public discovery portal. The CMS and portal are currently shared by five campus art museums and Historic Deerfield. This session will report the results of a groundbreaking User Study of the consortium’s discovery interface, undertaken in concert with research partners Slover Linnett Audience Research. Presenters will explore the ways in which user communities’ perceptions can help shape the future of what it means to share information about visual resources. Speakers will address the benefits and challenges of sharing a CMS and public portal between six rich, yet divergent, collections through an exploration of key topics that enable public discovery: metadata governance, digital asset management, and incorporation of collection-specific requirements. We will also consider the ways in which the communities’ expectations about navigation, art information transparency, and federated discovery align with current practices, and can be leveraged to help build more equitable and accessible collections platforms. We would welcome a robust discussion or question and answer session in response to these questions and hope that this presentation serves as a jumping-off point for future discussions about effective collaboration and user experience.

You can also view the slides at this link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vTcYHiXx55i5qfEEv7HN76PRV8k-jhkfX3CKL4fpoOMySKja43_Mvvk6ZdJtwk8duNN0oi04QrJFxIu/pub?start=false&loop=true&delayms=3000&slide=id.gd1fe97ab1f_0_580

*This session is part of the VRA 2022 Pre-Conference*

This session will address how to prioritize anti-racist work as a solo visual resources professional. Combining short presentations and audience participation, we will discuss how to manage the changing (or un-changing) expectations of our employers while maintaining a full workload. Members of the Solo SIG community will share examples of how we have modified our workflows and long-term goals, designed projects using an anti-racist lens, and explored new collaborations with faculty and students. Our SIG is especially interested in how these issues affect solo and newly solo professionals differently, how technology can assist, how best to mobilize student employees, and how to build a supportive community outside your institution. If you are a solo professional, part of a limited staff, and/or do not have access to a community that is actively promoting anti-racist work, we invite you to this session.

Exploration of visualization tools in the Digital Humanities/Digital Art History realm
Catherine Adams

As a follow-up to a brief overview of textual analysis tools presented at last year’s conference, this talk is intended as an introduction to visualization tools. A common frustration is many visualization tools were created for the business and science fields. Humanities researchers must think creatively about their dataset and how to utilize visualization tools. Along with some best practice tips to organizing your dataset, there will be a quick introduction to the pros and cons of using Palladio and Tableau Public. Attendees will come away with a better understanding of how to use these digital tools.

Assessing the use of Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) by Art Historians and Archaeologists
Kayla Olson

This paper discusses a study (completed in the spring of 2021) which explores how common the use of Qualitative Data Analysis software (QDAS) is among two kinds of object-based researchers: art historians and archaeologists. Surveys were disseminated in a snowball fashion and contained open and closed questions. The questions sought to give participants a platform to describe if, why, and how they use programs like Atlas.ti, NVivo, Dedoose, and MAXQDA throughout their research process. While not QDAS, the image management application Tropy was also included. The author hopes that the anonymized responses will prompt discussion among professionals in academic librarianship and visual resources management about the possible impact of these digital tools on researchers in these disciplines. The question remains on whether researchers in art and material culture disciplines would benefit more from QDAS if participants were aware of: 1) Their existence and 2) Their ability to help organize artifact data and to assist in performing image-based analysis.

Supporting Art History Students’ Digital Projects at American University
Samuel Sadow and Melissa Becher

In 2019, the art history program at American University gave its masters students a new option for the capstone project that is the culmination of the degree: create a digital project on an art historical topic using Omeka S or Wordpress. Initially, only a single student chose to complete a digital capstone over a traditional thesis, but within two years there was near parity between the two options, meaning seven digital capstones for the 2021 cohort. To support these projects, a close partnership quickly developed between the University’s library, the visual resources center, and the archives. This session covers how three campus units coordinate that support for these innovative digital humanities projects, including administration of the platforms, instruction, technical support, preservation, and access to the final projects. The session will also showcase examples of student work to demonstrate the variety and creativity of projects that can be accomplished using these platforms, as well as their contributions to the field of art history. The outcome of this initiative is clear: the best of digital humanities, weaving design and technology with rigorous art historical research, and finished projects that have already resulted in successful job applications in the field.

For decades, visual resources professionals have been concerned with the creation, organization, maintenance, and use of local image collections, geared to the specific needs of their constituents.  Those collections are both analog and digital, original and reproductive, but all reflective of local communities.  This session encourages essays and speculations about the future of those local collections, collections of any format, as pedagogy and image technologies continue to evolve.

In 2021, the National Archives of Estonia engaged Digital Transitions’ Service division, Pixel Acuity, to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to analyze part of its historic record. The objective was to use this tool to enhance their collection with descriptive metadata that identified persons of interest in a collection of over 8,000 photographic glass plate negatives, a task that would ordinarily take years of human labor. In this presentation, we discuss our approach to accurately detecting and identifying human subjects in transmissive media, our initial findings using commercially available AI models, and the subsequent refinements made to our workflow to generate the most accurate metadata. In addition to working with commercially available AI models, we developed strategies for validation of AI-generated results without additional human supervision, and explored the benefits of building bespoke, heritage-specific AI models. By combining all of these tools, we developed a highly customized solution that greatly expedited accurate metadata generation with minimal human oversight, operated efficiently on large collections, and supported discovery of novel content within the archive.

The Local Planning Committee has arranged two informal tours of the George Peabody Library. Each tour is 45 min to an hour. If you cannot make this time, there is another one on March 30 at 6:00 pm. Show up at the library on your own or sign up at the registration desk to find a group to join for the trip. The library is about a 5-8 minute ride share from the hotel. A PDF with the full information is attached.

The George Peabody Library is a remarkable research library housed in a remarkable building. The library collection, part of the Special Collections division of The Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, contains over 300,000 volumes primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries, but also includes a great many Renaissance and subsequent imprints. The collection includes volumes important in the history of printing, science, and literature from the Renaissance to 19th Century Baltimore. Highlights include: Books of Hours, first editions of Copernicus and Galileo, 16th Century Herbals, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, early editions of Don Quixote, and children’s books.

Also view their latest exhibit Grace Notes in American History: 200 Years of Songs from the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection: library.jhu.edu/about/exhibitions/grace-notes-in-american-history/

VREPS is thrilled to continue this conference tradition, Stories from the Start, an informal conversation with three experienced visual resource professionals about their career beginnings and the road that led them to where they are today. Have questions about starting out in the Visual Resources field? Interested in hearing other VRA members’ backstories? Speakers will share stories from the beginning years of their career and discuss the difficulties they faced. An open discussion will follow, allowing all attendees to ask questions.

This year's speakers include: 

Jenni Rodda - Manager, Digital Media and Computer Services - Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Jenni Rodda started her career as a humble slide binder while an art history graduate student at Brown University, under the tutelage of the legendary Norine Duncan. She then took on management of the slide library at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before being named the Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia.  After brief periods working in banking and selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, she has been at the Institute of Fine Arts/NYU since 1986.  She holds an AB in Fine Arts/Art History from Wilson College (Chambersburg, PA), an MA in art history from Brown University, and an MSIS in information science from Drexel University.  Her current job responsibilities include management of the Institute's image collections (both analog and digital), coordination of classroom services (video recording, captioning and archiving; classroom hybridization, hardware, software, network services, applications, digital accessibility services), administration of imaging services (image creation and storage for classroom use, research, publications, and headshots), compilation of the Institute's Annual, and advocating for the Institute on a variety of University-wide committees, including the University Council of Information Officers.  She has served the Association on committees (Publications Advisory, Awards, Education, SEI Implementation, and Nominating, among others), and on the Board (Vice President 1993-1995, President-elect, President, past-President, 1997-2001); she has served as Chair of the Association's Greater New York Chapter three times (most recently 2009-2010), and is one of that Chapter's founding members.  Jenni has been guest editor of the VRA Bulletin twice, and has been presenting at conferences since 1991.  She has been on the conference planning committee for SECAC, been the Vice Moderator and Moderator of the ARLIS/NA Visual Resources Division; and served as the Board liaison between VRA and ARLIS.  She was awarded the Association's Distinguished Service Award in 2004. 

Molly Schoen - Visual Resources Curator - Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY
Molly Schoen is the Visual Resources Curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Information. Her professional career began while pursuing her Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from Wayne State University. During grad school, she interned at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Motown Museum. Her first professional position was Registrar at the Mott-Warsh Collection, a collection of modern and contemporary art of the African diaspora based in Flint, MI. Following that, she worked in the Visual Resources Collections of the History of Art Department at the University in Michigan. In 2015, she began her current full-time role at FIT. She has taught a class on Visual Resources Management at the Pratt Institute since 2018. For almost ten years, she has been very active within the VRA, having served in the past as co-chair of VREPS and chair of the Greater New York chapter.

John Taormina- Curator of Visual Resources and Head, Visual Media Lab - Duke University
John Taormina began his career in the visual resources/image management professionin 1982. He has a B.A. and M.A. in art history as well as formal training in art collections management. He has directed the image collections at George Washington University, Oberlin College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan. Since 2000 he has been the Curator of Visual Resources at Duke University. Asthe Curator of Visual Resources at Duke, he oversees all aspects of the departmental digital and analog visual media collections, and also manages the department’s online and print communications programs and exhibition spaces. John served for ten years (1996-2005, 2009-10) as the editor of the VRA Bulletin. From 1996-2003, John also served on four successive VRA Executive Boards. In 2005 he received both the VRA Distinguished Service Award and the VRA Nancy DeLaurier Award, for his contributions and leadership in publications and educational programs inthe VRA and in the visual resources profession. John has been a core member of the Duke Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (formerly Wired! Lab) since 2013. He has been the metadata and image consultant to the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database project since its inception in 2011. John published his 150-page Digital Humanities Bibliography in 2019. He is currently researching the history of Ohio's art museums.

The Visual Resources' Emerging Professionals and Students Group (VREPS) would like to invite our emerging professionals and students to get together and chat about bright ideas, shared struggles in the workplace, questions about next steps, and more. This friendly roundtable discussion will be an opportunity for VREPS members (and any other interested students or new professionals!) to share a little bit about themselves—what drew you to the field? What are your goals? If you’re currently a student, what fun experiences have you had, or what are you struggling with? The goal of this session is to bring our emerging professionals and students together to form a sense of community (and hopefully friendship!).

Critical Cataloging Conversations in Teaching, Research, and Practice
This session seeks to explore the ways in which increased access to digitized materials coincides with increasingly urgent conversations about social justice, cultural humility, and ethical stewardship. What are the ethical implications inherent in metadata, cataloging, classification standards, practice, and infrastructure in archives, libraries, museums, and visual resources collections? How have the fields of art history, museum practice, and studio practice as well as associated current curricula in these fields and in library science responded to the necessity for critical cataloging when describing visual art? The speakers explore ways to mitigate hierarchies of oppression in descriptive metadata through a variety of perspectives on critical and radical cataloging, including: assessments of these fields of study; curricular opportunities in the arts and library science; special topics of outsider art, race, gender, and sexuality; and adapting to non-Western knowledge systems. The goal is to raise awareness about critical cataloging issues, to incorporate marginalized communities’ language in order to give voice to the historically underrepresented, and to discuss successful learning opportunities, projects, and workflows for change.

Co-Moderators:
Maureen Burns, IMAGinED Consulting
Bridget Madden, Associate Director, Visual Resources Center, Department of Art Hisotry, University of Chicago

Describing Art on the Street: The Graffiti Art Community Voice 
Ann M. Graf, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, Simmons University

In the field of information science, we strive to provide access to information through the most efficient means possible. This is often done through the use of controlled vocabularies for description of subjects, and, in the case of art objects, for the identification of styles, processes, materials, and types. My research has examined the sufficiency of controlled vocabularies such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for description of graffiti art processes and products. This research is evolving as the AAT is responding to warrant for a broader set of terms to represent outsider art communities such as the graffiti art community. The methods used to study terminological warrant by examining the language of the graffiti art community are helpful to give voice to artists who work outside the traditional art institution, allowing the way that they talk about their work and how they describe it to become part of the common discourse. It is hoped that this research will inspire others who design and supplement controlled vocabularies for use in the arts to give priority in descriptive practice to those who have been historically underrepresented or made invisible by default use of terminology that does not speak to their experiences.

Queer Work | Queer Archives
Jenn Sichel, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Louisville
Miriam Kienle, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Kentucky

How do we teach students to conduct queer research in the field of art history? In this presentation we explore methods to bridge the gap between reading queer theory and doing queer research in archives, databases, and collections. We will elucidate several practical and practice-based questions: How do search terms function in queer research? And how might they falter, as gender expression and sexaully orientation are frequently not indexed? How do we come to rely on anecdotal knowledge and gossip when conducting queer research? And what are the possibilities and limitations of this kind of knowledge? How can we account for absences, when queer content is missing or destroyed? How can we equip our students to address such questions in their research? We conclude the presentation by reflecting on how these practical concerns become fertile ground for scholarly interventions in the field of queer art history.

Pattern and Representation: Critical Cataloging for a New Perspective on Campus History
Megan Macken, Assistant Department Head, Digital Resources and Discovery Services, Oklahoma State

Prior to the fall of 2020, the historic record of art exhibitions held at Oklahoma State University (OSU) was available only in incomplete, unprocessed archival materials. Students in Louise Siddons’ fall 2020 History of American Art course conducted research in the digitized student newspaper archive to begin documenting OSU art exhibitions since 1960. The resulting database was shared with the public with the intention of building on the project in future courses. Throughout the project both students and faculty engaged in critical cataloging.

Using the exhibition dataset they had created, students completed two analytical assignments: a traditional art history essay in which they considered one exhibition closely, and a critical reflection prompting them to consider their new understanding of the university’s history based on the aggregation of exhibitions. As gaps and surprises in representation appeared, students developed a more nuanced picture of institutional culture in the latter half of the 20th century.

After the course concluded, art history and library faculty standardized the student-generated data in preparation for sharing on other platforms such as Wikidata. Some artists who have exhibited at OSU also have interviews in the OSU oral history collections, and intersections between these projects and the questions raised by surfacing this metadata were explored. In the process issues emerged around artists’ preferred ways of identifying themselves as well as the difficulties of achieving a balance between increased representation of artists on the margins and respect for the privacy of living artists.
 

The welcome reception marks the end of the first day of the conference. Come to catch up with old friends and meet new ones. We especially encourage first-time attendees, new members, new professionals, and students to attend. Food and beverages will be served. Online attendees can join us in the Wonder Room (linked in the Attendee Portal)

Materials-based collections represent a challenging new mode of information management in terms of subject specialization, physical description and accommodation, and institutional mission.  Building upon the successful introductory meeting of this Group in Los Angeles at the 2019 Conference, the goal of this SIG is to provide a forum for open discussion of Material and Object Collections and their relationship to various library/visual resources tasks.  The Material and Object Collections SIG provides an opportunity for individuals working with a variety of materials and objects collections – including those that support art and art history courses, those that support architecture and design courses, and those in cultural heritage organizations – to share ideas, issues, and potential solutions in regard to tasks similar to common library/visual resources activities (including cataloging, documentation, staffing, outreach), as well as more specialized concerns relating to the management of physical objects (security, storage and retrieval, the design of user spaces, etc.).      
By continuing to offer an opportunity for participants to share brief introductions and profiles of their collections, we hope to encourage networking and exchange information about sources for specialized items; to display sample items and share surplus samples with other collections; and to provide examples of successful solutions to typical problems. Our long-range goal is to maintain an ongoing support group that can be of particular benefit to those professionals who are in the beginning stages of building or organizing physical collections.

Crowdsourcing Collection Development
Dacia Metes

Queens Memory is an ongoing community archiving program that engages with our local communities in our two-fold mission to (1) push local history collections out to the public through programming and online resources, and (2) pull new materials into our collections from the diverse communities of Queens, NYC. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to close our buildings, cease all in-person work and programming and shift our work to the virtual world. Our team quickly modified our processing workflow and asset tracking with the high volume of crowd-sourced donations coming through new online submission forms, set up in a rapid response to capture the stories coming from the pandemic’s first epicenter in the U.S. In my proposed conference session, I will discuss how we planned and managed the shift to fully online collection development. I will talk about our virtual outreach efforts to engage with the community and get them to contribute their materials, and how we developed the online tools and processes that allowed us to collect photographs, oral history interviews and other audio/visual materials, while also capturing the necessary metadata and consent forms. New internal communications channels, roles for volunteers, and triage processing for publication resulted from these efforts and are now essential parts of the team’s practices.

Win-Win Situations: Building Collections and Building Community Through a New Collaboration Model
Sonja Sekely-Rowland and Jackie Spafford

What began as an NEH-funded foundational project to investigate flipping the typical processing models for preserving 35mm slide collections quickly became an expansive exercise in project management. Despite the complexities of working with multiple collections simultaneously, a number of positive overarching themes have (re)emerged. These include: 1) the value of traditional slide collections as tools for (re)engineering the role of visual resource centers in building community, 2) the construction of added-value opportunities, such as pre-professional training for students, and 3) (re)investments in collection building and the development of forward-facing resources. The presenters will offer a brief history of the NEH-funded project, provide project management insights including the challenges of working with living donors as well as estates, the development of a 35-point assessment rubric, and an update on their efforts to build a processing consortium. This presentation will discuss multiple positive outcomes associated with building collections and expanding outreach, and will extend an opportunity for VRA members to participate in future collaboration as we build a growing network of partners.

A Mid-Century Modern House Wins a Companion: documenting the conversion of a 1950s development house to a guest house and art gallery for the Currie House
Steve Tatum

My project is to photograph the conversion of a 1950s house into a guest house and art gallery for the neighboring Currie House. Leonard Currie, FAIA, built his family’s home in 1960-61 in Blacksburg, Virginia, in a hilly area that was that was being developed at the time. A prime example of mid-century modern residential architecture, it won an AIA Homes for Better Living Award in 1963 and is a landmark of Virginia architecture. Peter Trower purchased the Currie House from Currie in the 1960s a few years after Currie moved to Chicago. Trower has lived there ever since, preserving it as an historic building. The majority of houses in the neighborhood follow an economical template of a main floor, basement, and carport. One of these houses is next door to the Currie House. After the long-time owners moved to a retirement village, Trower and his wife, Marcella Briggs, purchased it and commissioned Warren Kark to convert it to a guest house and gallery for their art collection. Kark was Virginia Tech’s architect in the 1980s and is Professor of Architecture Emeritus. He has complete license to design the conversion, so the remodeled house will be the architect’s conception. The new design will respond to the Currie House, while still fitting into the neighborhood. The photographs show the progress of construction. They will be displayed in JSTOR Forum and the library’s home-grown database when the house is complete.

Community Collaboration: Mapping a Cemetery and Building an Archive
Jeannine Keefer

This paper will cover the evolution of the East End Cemetery digital map and its associated archive.

Orienteering in Visual Collections: Discovering Content via a Map Interface
Brian Shelburne

Collections of visual materials are, ironically, typically accessed textually. Large search engines and some well-funded apps such as Pinterest allow for non-textual searching, but it is quite uncommon for local collections of images to allow access and discovery through any means except the old-school text box. Using GIS technology, a different type of visual search is possible for smaller local collections of images and other items. Most items in cultural object-based collections have associated geographical information associated with them in the form of current locations, find sites, creation sites, etc. Using a geoportal created with software such as GeoBlacklight, this geospatial information can be displayed on a single map, allowing users of a collection to view its contents. This presentation examines the implementation of such a system at UMass Amherst and discusses successes and challenges encountered in that process.

What are the latest developments on JSTOR Forum? Join us and your fellow Forum users to learn about new enhancements and upcoming features to make cataloging and sharing faster and easier, helping you get your unique content into the hands of researchers.

We’ll explore the results participants are seeing after sharing Open Community Collections on JSTOR, and introduce JSTOR’s many new features and functionality for researching, teaching, and learning with images as part of the ongoing Artstor integration.

As always, your insights will help us continue our mission to reduce costs, extend access, and preserve scholarship for the future. See you in person or virtually!

Presenters:

• Deirdre Ryan, Solution Owner, Operational Excellence, ITHAKA
• Jason Przybylski, Associate Director, Open Collections & Infrastructure, ITHAKA
• Syed Amaanullah, Senior Product Manager ITHAKA

The Local Planning Committee has arranged for an informal tour of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The tour is approximately an hour. Show up at the library on your own or sign up at the registration desk to find a group to join for the trip. The library is about a 5-8 minute ride share from the hotel. Meet in Central Hall. A PDF with the full information is attached.

The Central Library is located in the heart of Mount Vernon. Designed by architect Clyde N. Friz this building opened its doors in 1933 and recently underwent a 5 year renovation. With more than half a million visitors each year, the state-of-the-art renovations to the Central Library complement Pratt's significant print collection with the latest technologies, welcoming a vibrant future while preserving a cherished historic landmark.

The library is open to the public Monday-Thursday from 10am-7pm and Friday & Saturday from 10am-5pm. Be sure to check out the Year of the Woman exhibit on the first floor annex and the Life and Literary Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe exhibit featuring some rare artifacts from our Special Collections Department on the 2nd floor.

In this session Andreas Knab from vrcHost will share updates made to the MDID3 application over the past year. Other speakers (tbd) will give short presentations on the use of MDID at their institutions. Topics for discussion include software and hardware requirements, installation issues, best practices, system integration, custom application development, etc. This informative session is open to anyone using or interested in MDID. Adequate time for a question and answer period will follow the presentation.

How We Know What We See (& Hear): Visual Literacy Pedagogy in the Public Library
Debra Elfenbein

The use of visual literacy instruction in a public library program series, How We Know What We See (& Hear), promotes increased primary source and arts literacies in creative productions such as oral history and dance. The first program of the series, How We Know What We See (& Hear): How to "Read" an Oral History, introduces oral history recordings as unmediated text, truthful but not necessarily factual historical evidence, to experience, appreciate, and evaluate. Careful "reading" of an oral history author's text requires seeing and knowing its production values, including the power dynamics between oral author and interviewer. In the next program in the series, participants are shown how to "read" the text of a dance using the vocabulary of Laban movement analysis. Public library programming goals of engagement and enrichment of patrons can be met in focused literacy instruction in series such as How We Know What We See (& Hear).

Visual Literacy and First-Year Instruction
Michalle Gould

Visual literacy is increasingly important in the age of social media, in which ideas and arguments are communicated through memes and infographics. Traditional information literacy instruction has largely focused on CRAAP type rubrics and distinguishing between "good" and "bad" sources. We need to do more to help individuals gain a solid foundation for sorting through an incredibly convoluted information landscape in and beyond their academic careers. This session will focus on how interweaving info literacy and visual literacy instruction into the first-year curriculum can do that.

Disinformation and Deepfakes: The Urgent Need for Visual Literacy
Molly Schoen

Our everyday lives are more saturated in images and videos than any other time in human history. This fact alone underscores the need to implement visual literacy skills in all stages of education, from pre-K to post-grad. Learning how to read images with critical, analytical eyes is crucial to understanding the world around us as we see it represented in the news, social media, advertisements, etc. New technologies have exasperated this already urgent need for visual literacy education. Synthetic media, deepfakes, APIs, bot farms, and other forms of artificial intelligence have many innovative uses, but bad actors also use them to fan the flames of disinformation. We have seen the grave consequences from this age of disinformation, from undermining elections to attempts to delegitimize science and doctors, undoubtedly raising the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic. What do we need to know about these new forms of altered images made by artificial intelligence? How do we discern between real, human-made content versus fakes made by computers, which are becoming more and more difficult to discern? This paper aims to raise awareness of how new forms of visual media can manipulate and deceive the viewer. Audience participants will learn how to empower themselves and their peers into being more savvy consumers of visual materials by understanding the basics of AI and recognizing the characteristics of faked media.

Repatriating the Archives: An Urban Reservation Reunion
The place now known as Baltimore, like the rest of what is now known as the United States of America, has always been home to Native peoples. Baltimore is part of the ancestral homelands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock, and a diverse host of American Indian folks from many nations have passed through or lived here at different times, and still do. In the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Lumbee Indians and members of other tribal nations migrated to Baltimore City, seeking jobs and a better quality of life. On the east side of town, they created a vibrant, intertribal American Indian community, which they affectionately referred to as their "reservation." In the decades since, due to a complex set of factors ranging from upward mobility, to Urban Renewal, to gentrification, most American Indian people moved away from the area, which continues to transform. In collaboration with her elders, Ashley Minner has been mining archives to repatriate their heritage and reconstruct East Baltimore's "reservation." She sees this as an urgent project of reclamation of history, space, and belonging.

Ashley Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She earned an MFA (’11) and MA (’07) in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a PhD (’20) in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. In addition to maintaining her artistic practice, Ashley works as Assistant Curator for History and Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

You do not have to be registered for the conference to attend the keynote. Sign up in advance to view the Zoom webinar: https://vraweb-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gxWoXlBMThq-WPO9HHjw8A

Meetings should be arranged by the Chapter Chair. A room will not be assigned.

Location details are TBD and will be shared in advance of the event.

The Local Planning Committee has arranged two informal tours of the George Peabody Library. Each tour is 45 min to an hour. If you cannot make this time, there is another one on March 29 at 2:00 pm. Show up at the library on your own or sign up at the registration desk to find a group to join for the trip. The library is about a 5-8 minute ride share from the hotel. A PDF with the full information is attached.

The George Peabody Library is a remarkable research library housed in a remarkable building. The library collection, part of the Special Collections division of The Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, contains over 300,000 volumes primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries, but also includes a great many Renaissance and subsequent imprints. The collection includes volumes important in the history of printing, science, and literature from the Renaissance to 19th Century Baltimore. Highlights include: Books of Hours, first editions of Copernicus and Galileo, 16th Century Herbals, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, early editions of Don Quixote, and children’s books.

Also view their latest exhibit Grace Notes in American History: 200 Years of Songs from the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection: library.jhu.edu/about/exhibitions/grace-notes-in-american-history/

In-Person only. No live stream of breakfast, sorry!

Please see the attached agenda.

All VRA Members are invited to attend online, even if not attending the conference. Register in advance at this link: https://vraweb-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OWI0AQrFS2GfA8a3djxMZQ

This session will cover aspects of the social justice theme from the Framework for Visual Literacy for Higher Education (Framework for VL), available at https://acrlvltf.org/, currently awaiting final approval by ACRL. While the audience for this Framework for VL is higher education librarians, the document  is multidisciplinary and easily adaptable to work for professionals in a variety of visual fields.

The Framework for VL acknowledges that “pursuing social justice can include decentering whiteness and hegemonic practices in visual collections and canons.” The panelists, two task force members behind the document’s creation, will expand on select knowledge practices and dispositions that can teach students to recognize, deconstruct, and disrupt visual canons.

Examples that will be included are:

• Evaluate how authorities establish what is or is not included in the visual canon of a field, elevating some voices and cultures while suppressing others. 
• Consider if creation and/or use of a visual will constitute misappropriation, which dissociates visuals from their original contexts and deprives individual creators and cultural communities of agency and credit.
• Anticipate the ways in which algorithms, social media, and participatory technologies obscure or promote visuals and visual media creators, which may reflect commercial interests and reinforce existing social dynamics.
• Prioritize ethical considerations for cultural and intellectual property when creating, sharing, or using visuals.
• Reflect on the dual role that visuals may play in either fostering or subverting harmful, restrictive, social, or cultural norms. 

The session will include reflection and discussion the role of the visual resources professional in promoting social justice and instructional techniques using real world examples of concepts to better connect theory to practice around social justice issues.

The EAC invites you to our monthly Community Hour to join us for a discussion of DEIA work. 
Did you work on a project over the past year that addressed or addresses an issue of equity, inclusiveness, accessibility, and or diversity? How was the impact? Did you nudge the needle, did you make a difference? Did you advocate for yourself in a way to make your job more manageable? Did your employer change their attitudes to take into account people’s caregiving responsibilities? Were you asked to change your supervisory duties to account for at-home work? All of these variables fall under equitable work environments. Would you mind sharing what did and didn’t work?

The EAC’s community hour is the perfect platform to share your experience. Lets celebrate our challenges and successes, and recognize those amongst us who have acted on a DEIA idea to make our workplace better. Let’s brainstorm what we can do to effect change and how to counteract the barriers we are facing at our own institutions. EAC hopes to bring awareness to the various ways attendees might incorporate DEIA work into their everyday activities, whether at work or in other situations and interactions.

The Emerging Voices Lightning Round Session provides emerging professionals in the visual resources field and related, the opportunity to present topics from exceptional coursework, such as a master's thesis, or topics with which they are engaged early in their professional life. Emerging professionals are defined as either students in programs leading to a career in visual resources or related, or those within 10 years of the start of their career. Topics presented reveal new ideas as well as different ways of thinking about established concepts. Speakers will give the conference attendees a glimpse of interests and current discourses of the newest VRA members. This year, lighting is striking for a very long time, and speakers will have 15 to 20 minutes to present.

This year's speakers include:

Sarah Beck
Visual Resource Curator, Lafayette College
Title: Cinema and the Community Archive: Digitizing the Tony Ramos Video Collection
Abstract: Audio-visual digitization and description is often a pricey endeavor that can seem unattainable for small independant cultural organizations without large endowments or partnerships. These projects require specialized technology and knowledge to effectively create and maintain sustainable digital surrogates, and cause these smaller institutions to weigh the benefit of creating enhanced access to these cultural objects against the cost of hardware, software, and man-power. This presentation will explain the technical and ethical considerations of working with a Providence, RI-based Cape Verdean community archive to digitize a collection of documentary films made by a local filmmaker and artist, with the intention of making these cultural artifacts accessible for the first time to local and international Cape Verdeans. 

Dijia Chen
University of Virginia, PhD Candidate, Student
Title: Ephemeras Reconsidered: Piecing Together Temporary Exhibitions in the Study of Architectural History
Abstract: Architectural exhibitions are always considered problematic, for the exhibitionary ephemeras (images, texts, models, installations, etc.) can never fully represent the real architecture, and may even create another “life” for architecture. While architecture is always considered to be stable, concrete, and physical, the production of architecture has been increasingly shaped by temporary exhibitions, in spite of their ephemeral and media-saturated nature. To study the visual and textual archival documents left by exhibitions, therefore, is a challenging yet fruitful way of understanding the construct of architectural history since the modern time. In this presentation, I share a set of methods to approach exhibitionary ephemeras in order to piece together these temporary events in history, and analyze the process in which the complex body of architecture is negotiated through photographic representations, scaled models, textual narratives, etc. that in turn shape the production of architecture in real life. In doing so, I seek to reconsider the role of ephemeras in the close-reading of architectural exhibitions, and further, in the study of architectural history.

Do not miss the Vendor and Poster Session! The VRA community event is an opportunity to get to know the people who support our work as image management professionals. Refreshments will be served and VRA members will be have focused time to meet with VRA’s commercial partners and chat with our presenters in the Poster Session. Refreshments will be served.

This hour and a half-long event will provide ample opportunities for conversations about products, projects, and opportunities to become more involved in the work of the VRA.

You can join in person at the Royal Sonesta Hotel or online via our Wonder Room (see the Attendee Portal for the link).

Poster Session Presenters:

Kendall Aughenbaugh
Digitization During Disease: Hillwood’s Reorientation to Remote Volunteers

Joan Beaudoin
User interactions with online art collections: Preliminary findings of a study based on Nielsen’s five usability components

Rémi Castonguay
Developing Collections in the Age of Crypto Art

Ann Graf
Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Gender for Doll Description 

Isaac Harper
Scanning the Wall: Medium Format Capture of Oversized Cultural Heritage Items

Elaine Paul
Teaching Data Management to Art Students: A Work in Progress