Images, April 2010
vol.7, no.2

Chapter News
Compiled by Trudy Levy (Image Integration)

Great Lakes Regional Chapter
Submitted by Marlene Gordon (University of Michigan-Dearborn)

The Great Lakes Chapter held their annual meeting in Atlanta on March 18.  There was a discussion on membership.  Sue Morris compiled a list of potential members in the regional area for the Membership Committee. Committee members are Marlene Gordon, Sue Morris and Astrid Otey.  Joe Romano and Lesley Chapman volunteered to assist.  The winner of the Chapter Grant Workshop was announced; Yin-Fen Pao received the award.  She attended the Selling Visual Resources workshop and will report to the chapter at the fall meeting.  Lesley Chapman also volunteered to share information from the Strategic Planning workshop.  There was discussion on the fall meeting that will be a joint meeting with ARLIS/NA Mid-States.  The meeting will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and our host will be Rebecca Price.  A tour of the recently renovated University of Michigan Museum of Art will be offered.  It was also suggested that a tour of the Detroit Institute of Arts be planned for Saturday morning.

Northern California Chapter
Submitted by Karen Kessel (Sonoma State University) and Heather Cummins (Academy of Art University)

The Northern California Chapter held their spring meeting at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design on February 26. Professor Judy Weedman, San José State University, School of Library and Information Science, and Layna White, Head of Collections Information and Access, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presented two lectures. Weedman presented ideas from her paper, "The Practice of Design: Creating Local Vocabularies for Images.” She explored design theory in relationship to how meaning is structured or revealed by the organization of knowledge as it is seen in locally created vocabularies for image collections. To read her paper in its entirety, please visit: http://en.scientificcommons.org/20713452. White's lecture used Matthew Barney's, “Drawing Restraint 14”, as an example of site-specific, time-sensitive art that presents art documentation challenges and problems. She also explored issues around locally created metadata in contrast to metadata created specifically for public information needs. White concluded her talk about SFMOMA's participation in the STEVE Project and issues around social tagging and folksonomies in relation to museum collections.  

Karen represented the N.C. Chapter at the Chapter Chairs meeting at the conference, where we brainstormed on strategies for attracting participation. During the conference, the few Northern and Southern CA members attending got together and discussed having a joint 2-day educational program in Santa Barbara with our ARLIS counterparts in the summer of 2011.

Southeast Chapter
Submitted by Barbara A. Brenny (North Carolina State University Libraries)

VRA Southeast and VRA Mid-Atlantic are going to have a joint mini conference in Richmond, VA October 20-23. We choose these dates because many members will be in town for SECAC (Southeastern College Art Conference). We're still trying to determine the programming.

Southern California Chapter
Submitted by Jennifer Faist (Art Center College of Art & Design)

In February, members and guests of the Southern California Chapter met at the Automobile Club of Southern California in Los Angeles. Morgan Yates, the club's corporate archivist, gave a visual presentation covering the club’s headquarters building, history, archives and photo collection.  The club serves the thirteen southernmost counties of California, and so most of the material in the archive relates to this area, especially Los Angeles.

There is a large map collection of both folded and strip maps as well as tour books.  The photo collection contains images of employees, map printers, surveyors, cartographers, and for the most part documents the club’s activities.  One of the highlights of the collection is a series of engineering photo notebooks from Ernest E. East, a civil engineer who documented road conditions and construction in the field.  Each photo is numbered and has a typed caption.  This collection is a boon for researchers of local history as it consists of images not typically photographed.  The archive also houses some rare 14” x 17” glass plate negatives of the missions and Yosemite. In 1909, the club began publishing a member magazine covering regional travel & culture, and artwork was commissioned for the covers for many years.

There are 250 cover art paintings in the collection and 30,000 photographs. So far they’ve scanned 8000 negatives, and there are 1000 images & 100 maps available through the USC library.

Since we had a small group, Morgan was able to take us inside the climate-controlled storage room where we were able to view the shelves of archival boxes containing maps and photographs as well as moveable walls filled with the original cover and editorial art from the magazine.  We then walked around the headquarters admiring the Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. The historic landmark building, built around an interior courtyard shaded by a Moreton Bay Fig tree that predates the building, was originally situated among the numerous car and tire manufacturers that lined Figueroa in the 1920s.  After the tour, the group walked to a local Mexican restaurant to eat lunch.

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