Monday, March 6, 2006
9:00am – 10:30am

Session 1: Mission and Metamorphosis: Changing approaches to sharing images and information online.

Museums and arts organizations have long recognized the potential of the online environment to further their institutional missions and promote their collections and the visual arts while simultaneously grappling with the costs of digitization, cataloguing, and rights and reproductions management. As art information and issues of copyright, fair use, and the public domain become increasingly complicated, what are the costs, benefits, and possibilities of placing art images and their related data in the public domain? How can museums better fulfill their missions by sharing images and information online and what might be the potential value in terms of scholarship, educational outreach, and serving the public good? How have these institutional policies and practices begun to transform internally and how will they alter the future the use and availability of images and image data in academic institutions, libraries, digital archives, and publications? What are efficient and scalable ways of sharing of these images and data? What are the costs, benefits and dangers of making these images and related data freely available? How might these images and related information be harvested, used, and redistributed? This session will explore these issues from the perspectives of major museums and arts information organizations so that we might move closer toward finding common solutions to the online image question that result in benefits rather than barriers.

Organizer/Introductions: Christine Kuan, Oxford University Press
Moderator: Eve Siniako, CAA

Speakers: Clifford A. Lynch, CNI
                  Kenneth Hamma, J. Paul Getty Trust
                  Susan Chun, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
                  Nancy Allen, ARTstor

Monday, March 6, 2006
9:00am – 10:30am

Session 2: Doing Big Things at Small Schools

In this rapidly evolving time for the visual resources profession, small institutions are faced with increasing demand for their services from departments other than the traditional Art and Art History departments. How are VR professionals using the systems they have selected to provide maximum service to the campus? How are they networking with their IT departments? How are they presenting themselves to the library and faculty?

This session will focus on how VR professionals at five small, private, liberal arts schools are managing their digital images and professional images on campus. The four representatives will be from schools that have between 1300 and 10,000 students.

The presenters will provide a variety of perspectives because of their administrative location, institution’s expectations, and local resources. They represent VR professionals who are part of Art History departments, and also those who are librarians servicing a much broader population of departments that include Art, Archaeology, French, Spanish, Theatre, Classics, and History. Their varying perspectives will illustrate the wide range of services that small institutions provide to their users. The panels will also discuss how their location in the administration facilitates their ability to provide digital images to their users.

We often hear of the amazing things that the larger institutions in VRA are doing. This session will focus on how smaller institutions are balancing increased demand with the realities of a limited staff. Discussion will focus on serving images to users, presenting ourselves as VR professionals, and guiding institutions in the development of digital collections.

Moderator: Colette Lunday Brautigam, Lawrence University

Speakers:
Colette Lunday Brautigam, Lawrence University
Brooke Cox, DePauw University
Heidi Eyestone, Carleton College
Gretchen Tuchel, currently University of Chicago, formerly of the University of St. Thomas and the College of St. Catherine
                 

Monday, March 6, 2006
11:00am -12:30pm

Session 3: Shared Cataloging for Images: fantasy or reality?

Using the Union Catalog for Art Images (UCAI) as its foundation, this session will explore the usefulness of copy cataloging for images in visual resource collections. For the past 3 years, UCAI (a research and development project funded by the Mellon Foundation) has been exploring the possibilities for such a copy cataloging utility, figuring out if and how it can work. UCAI aims to improve cataloging efficiencies, to support record sharing and to promote the use of standards in visual resource collections.

The session will follow the guidelines for a session with three speakers and one moderator. One speaker will talk about copy cataloging in general. What is it, what place does it have in the bibliographic world, what’s good and what doesn’t work so well? The second speaker will talk specifically about UCAI, including a demonstration of some of its functionality. What is this new utility, how was it built, what were the challenges in its creation and what is its potential in the visual resources community? The third speaker will come from the perspective of a visual resources curator and will discuss the ways in which a copy cataloging utility could benefit her department.

All of the panelists and the moderator have firsthand knowledge of UCAI either as part of the project team that is working on the utility or as a curator at one of the partner institutions with whose data the UCAI prototype was built.

Moderator: Ardys Kozbial, University of California, San Diego

Speakers: Trish Rose, University of California, San Diego
                  Trudy Jacoby, Princeton University
                  Rebecca Moss, University of Minnesota

Monday, March 6, 2006
11:00am -12:30pm

Session 4: DAMS Right! Using MDID for Managing Metadata and Sharing Collections

MDID(Madison Digital Image Database) the free, open source digital assets management system developed by James Madison University, is now widely used by dozens of institutions. MDID users, from both the academic and museum realm, will discuss their experiences with creating data structures and focus on the potential for collection sharing through MDID 2. The session should be of interest to MDID users as well as the broader visual resources community involved with managing metadata and in house collections.

Moderator: Brenda MacEachern, University of Western Ontario

Speakers:
Heather Cleary, Library/Visual Resources Center, Otis College of Art and Design
Marci Hahn, Roger Williams University
Jeanette Mills, School of Art, University of Washington
Christina B. Updike, School of Art and Art History, James Madison University