The holidays are here and the first decade of the 21st century is racing to a close. I would like to wish everyone a restful break and joyous holiday season before we start up what will hopefully be a wonderful new year.

As you know, the membership drive is on and each member, new or renewing, is important to the progress and promotion of visual resources and image management. So, spread the news about VRA, renew today, and enjoy the benefits of VRA membership, including: meaningful engagement in the work of the organization; discounts on professional development opportunities such as the conference, summer institute, and other educational events; cutting edge information through online communications such as the VRA Listserv, Images newsletter, Facebook, and Flickr sites; and formal articles based on research and professional practices in the VRA Bulletin; and more. Individual membership in VRA now costs $110, no longer based upon a salary levels. There are still provisions for those members in special or difficult circumstances with a student, retired, or unemployed category of membership costing $40. Institutional members are now clearly entitled to three named representatives who will receive all the privileges of membership for $300. We hope this rethinking of the membership categories has simplified things.

We have also tried to clarify the goals of VRA fundraising. VRA's main sources of operating revenue are membership dues, conference income, and targeted donations. With donations becoming increasingly important to the organization, please consider the VRA and VRA Foundation targeted funds and support opportunities (see http://www.vraweb.org/members/donation.html). Any amount of donation is welcome and appreciated to help VRA continue to provide excellent programs and services (and might very well be tax deductible). Donít forget to start your Amazon holiday shopping at the link in "My VRA" since the Visual Resources Association will receive a percentage back for every dollar you spend.

With the time for giving and receiving almost upon us, I hope VRA members realize that your Association wants to be there for you. As much as we hope the economy is stabilizing, we are still seeing a lot of change and colleagues making voluntary or involuntary adjustments to their career paths. The Transitions group is in place to provide ways to communicate and support those going through career changes. A VRA white paper,"Advocating for Visual Resources Management" provides pragmatic information about current trends to use in support of your VR operations. The "Criteria for the Hiring and Retention of Visual Professionals" is in the process of being updated. And last but not least, the 2009 Strategic Plan is providing a thought-provoking road map to guide the organization into the future. Therein you will find that opportunities abound for involvement in this organization and your volunteer efforts are most welcome. If you have ideas about other ways VRA can support you as a professional, please don't hesitate to contact me or any of the VRA Board members. It is an absolute pleasure to serve as your President and I thank you for the opportunity to lead the VRA into 2011. I gratefully acknowledge the hard work and forward thinking of all the VRA Board members (past, present, and future). There are VRA members whose extraordinary efforts on behalf of this organization might not be as visible, but they are equally important. Thank you for your continued participation in and support of VRA. It is you, the members, who make this organization.

So, get involved. Now, it is time to embrace a new decade and find expanded opportunities to work together and rejoice in our collegial network!

I thought I’d start off my first column by addressing an issue that has elicited a lot of conversation on the listserv, but isn’t heavy with legality, and technicality. I want to address an opportunity that is more and more frequent for VR curators, and other librarians and professionals that find themselves in the position of official or unofficial copyright guru.

There have been several threads recently about students asking for advice about using borrowed images for poster or T-shirt designs, and there have been some really great discussions about the legal aspects in answering these questions. However, I also think we should view it as a situation that allows us to broaden the copyright discussion from “will I or will I not get sued” or “will I or will I not get paid”, to an opportunity to also educate students about the constitutional base for copyright law: “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”1  And I emphasize, Progress.

There are all kinds of creativity, and there are many tools available to artists. Medium, application or technique, subject matter, mode of delivery, for example, are all aspects of the creative process where the artist can choose her tool. The decision to use specific tools for specific works can be quite purposeful.

One of the most used tools right now is cultural appropriation. We can see in media creation in public spaces like YouTube that remix, as well as other types of borrowing and referencing previous work is a very popular (if not the most common) strategy/approach for creating new media. Some successful YouTube art even appropriates non-masterpieces such as home videos and newscasts. Videos are Hitlerized, auto-tuned, re-enacted, imitated, etc. These are relevant strategies for making art, even posters, as the case may be.

But, I wonder why this is such a popular mode.  Are students (and other media creators) today even aware of the history of the idea of appropriation? Are they using it to its fullest extent and actually making an argument through their use of appropriation or are they just trying to be funny and cute by making a cultural reference? Are they just lazy and making the easiest visual metaphor that comes through their minds the day before the design is due? Obviously there are many reasons for use of pre-existing works. In our positions as copyright gurus we could just limit ourselves to a few words about Fair Use and the four factors, perhaps run through our institution’s copyright policy, and leave it at that. Or, we might do more.

As we increasingly become the go to people for copyright advice, it strikes me that this is an opportunity to educate not just about copyright, but about art making and visual argument. It’s one thing to tell a student, “This use is probably something that you should get a license for.” It’s another to say, “This use may not be in violation of copyright law, but I really encourage you to try and think creatively to find a more effective method or style for your project.”

It is not often the place of the librarian to tell students what art they can, should, shouldn’t, make. It may feel like overstepping your bounds to advise students in this way (though, for goodness sake, they are already coming to you for legal advice, and not many of us have an ounce of legal training). However, it is possible that a little discomfort on our part, could lead to a much richer experience for a student.

• We can ask is this Chagall painting the epitome of the point you are trying to make?
• Does this Warhol silk-screen illustrate exactly what the play is about?
• Is your fundraiser summed up in an artwork that was made thirty years ago?
• Is using a famous painting the right or best tool for your job or intended message?

Maybe sometimes the answer is “yes,” but I think a lot of the time the answer is “no.” Borrowing from existing work is pervasive and popular. Students are bombarded with YouTube, satirical animated sitcoms, ironic silkscreen t-shirts, etc. and the raw material is readily available through the web. In contrast, it takes more work and more thinking to start from scratch, but it might ultimately mean something more appropriate, more rewarding, and more memorable.

We can encourage students to see that a poster or T-shirt isn’t just a quick advertisement for something else. It can be an argument and work of art in its own right.

We can tell them: “Don’t give up an opportunity to be as creative and original as possible, and don’t give up a chance to express yourself precisely and with fervor. You might make the best poster ever by appropriating the work of another artist, but you might also make the best poster ever by using one of the many artistic methods available. This is an opportunity to find your voice, find the best tool, and make your statement. Don’t limit yourself.”

 1http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

What might have begun as a simple idea-a digital version of a slide library-has become complicated and enriched by the potential of the online network for sharing and discovery. As ARTstor evolves to serve an increasingly broad range of disciplines and users at over 1,300 educational institutions in 42 countries, our mission to provide a wealth of image collections for educational and scholarly use extends more than ever to the development of sophisticated software and services to enable greater ways of accessing visual materials online.

ARTstor Digital Library
Today, the ARTstor Digital Library shares more than 1.3 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences from superlative collections- such as Magnum Photos; Barnes Foundation; SFMOMA; Natural History Museum, London; Renzo Piano Building Workshop; Yale University Art Gallery; Latin American Art (Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros); Christopher Roy: African Art and Architecture; and others. We are also creating various Subject Guides to enable educators to explore the range of content beyond art history-from History of Medicine and Natural Science to Music History to Languages and Literature. Promoting the use of these collections for teaching and research on our website and through social media channels has also necessitated the ongoing development of our software tools so that users can more conveniently access these collections. Working towards better reaching educators, scholars, and students everywhere, our major software developments this year include: Batch Download to PowerPoint (registered users can download up to 100 images at a time directly into PowerPoint); ARTstor Mobile Beta (read-only features for ARTstor Digital Library available for Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch); and Faceted Search Beta (which allows users to filter search results by date, media type, and geography). For collections and features news: www.artstor.org and www.facebook.com/ARTstor

Shared Shelf
As we continue to work with the community to improve the Digital Library, we also know that institutions are faced with mounting interest in managing and sharing local institutional image collections within their own campuses and beyond. Through ARTstorís hosting pilot program (which hosts more than two million images for nearly 150 institutions on ARTstorís platform and allows local collections to be seamlessly searched and used alongside ARTstor Digital Library collections) institutions found that the ability to bring together institutional and ARTstor collections through a single discovery interface has proved incredibly powerful for scholars and students.

As a result of this pilot, ARTstor launched the Shared Shelf endeavor-a web-based software service with four major components: cataloging tools, controlled vocabulary warehouse, digital asset management system, and publishing to the web tools (which will make it much easier to share collections through the ARTstor Digital Library hosted environment, an institutional website, or public-access platforms like Flickr, Google, etc.). Nine institutions (Colby College, Cornell University, Harvard University, Middlebury College, New York University, Society of Architectural Historians, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami, and Yale University) are partnering with ARTstor in this effort. The first 25 early subscribers to Shared Shelf will be announced in spring 2011, and the live service is scheduled to be available to all nonprofit educational institutions beginning summer 2011. We are also in the midst of working with experts in the museum community to evaluate how Shared Shelf might serve museums by helping to manage and share their digital assets. For more info: www.sharedshelf.org

Controlled Vocabularies
While online visual content proliferates at a breakneck pace, educational and scholarly users still want and need more refined ways of discovering and working with digital images. But, as we are aware, cultural materials are not cataloged consistently across institutions (nor even within institutions), and therefore, are not always easily retrievable online. Controlled vocabularies are the key to enhancing online access whether searching by creator names, repositories, geographic terms, art and architecture terms, or works.

The Getty Research Institute (GRI), The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), the Library of Congress, and dozens of major libraries around the world have been thinking about and working toward building and aggregating controlled vocabularies to address precisely these issues and needs. In 2008, The Getty Research Institute (GRI) announced the launch of a new controlled vocabulary project- the Cultural Object Name Authority (CONA). CONA will develop and make available authoritative work records for both moveable and built works (e.g. painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.). The CONA project will be a monumental community-wide endeavor to assemble and distribute authoritative work records to enable the cultural heritage community to have an authority file to draw upon for cataloging, which will in turn enable powerful ways of connecting and accessing cultural heritage materials.

In an effort to assist in the creation of networked vocabularies, The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University and ARTstor will be working with the GRI to create a Built Works Registry (BWR). The BWR project will be open-access to allow individuals and institutions to consult these work records freely. The Avery Library, ARTstor, and the BWR Advisory Board (comprising leading scholars and experts from over a dozen international institutions) will be framing the policies for contribution and related editorial matters. All of the built work records created for the BWR will be offered to the CONA project. The BWR project has been awarded a three-year National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). See BWR Press Release: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2010/20101001.imls.html

Ultimately, visual resource needs are no longer limited to art and architecture departments; every academic discipline in the humanities and sciences- from literature to film studies, from economics to political history, from astronomy to zoology- requires the inclusion of visual materials in teaching, research, and learning. The challenges of building and sharing valuable image content online are, as we all know, irrevocably linked to the metadata, search algorithms, user interface, infrastructure, and online discovery environments we create to optimize access. In all of our efforts with the Digital Library, Shared Shelf, BWR, and other projects, ARTstor continues to be highly collaborative and consultative with our partners in the visual resource community. Their expertise along with that of museums, foundations, libraries, scholars, photographers, artists, and other stakeholders in the online information community has been essential in helping us to prioritize our efforts and to be responsive the needs of real end-users.

College Art Association
February 9-12, 2011
New York, NY
http://conference.collegeart.org/2011/

Electronic Resources & Libraries
February 28-March 2, 2011
Austin, TX
http://www.electroniclibrarian.com/

VRA + ARLIS/NA
March 24-28, 2011
Minneapolis, MN
http://www.vraweb.org/conferences/index.html

Association of College & Research Libraries
March 30-April 2, 2011
Philadelphia, PA
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/events/national/2011/index3.cfm

Museums and the Web
April 6-9, 2011
Philadelphia, PA
http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/index.html

DigCCurr Professional Institute:
Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle
May 15-20, 2011
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr/institute.html

Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources & Image Management
June 7-10, 2011
Albuquerque, New Mexico
http://www.vrafoundation.org/sei2011/

Electronic Visualisation and the Arts
July 6-8, 2011
London, UK
http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/2011_home

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

The Great Lakes Chapter held its fall meeting on October 22 at the University of Michiganís Hatcher Graduate Library new gallery space. In addition to the chapter members, several of ARLIS (Art Library Society of North America) joined us for breakfast and our business meeting. Scott Gilchrist of Archivision generously provided the breakfast. Terry Kerby announced that the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) will hold its meeting in Detroit hosted by Wayne State University. There will be a visual resources component to the meeting and some chapter members will be involved in the planning. The idea of a chapter travel award was discussed. It was decided that funds normally set aside for conference sponsorship and for workshop attendance would be used for the travel award. Meghan Musolff was reelected as Chapter Secretary. Bylaw revisions were discussed including a schedule for officer elections.

We joined ARLIS Midstates for lunch and then a tour of the new Cleopfil/Allied Works addition to the University of Michiganís Museum of Art. Additional time allowed us to explore the collections on our own. Marian Lambers presented, ìCollection Development and Institutional Identityî. The College of Creative Studies project, ìOut and Aboutî photographs high quality images of public art in Detroit was highlighted. Valuable suggestions on how to be proactive were presented. Meghan Musolff gave us a tour of the Visual Resources Collection in the History of Art Department and discussed their project to inventory, catalog and evaluated the slide collection for storage.

Mid-Atlantic Chapter Meetings
Submitted by Macie Hall (John Hopkins University)

The Mid-Atlantic Chapter has had two meetings since the VRA Annual Conference in Atlanta. On Friday, July 9, Chapter members met jointly with ARLIS/DC-MD-VA members at the Corcoran Library/Gallery of Art/ College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. Jacqueline Protka, Digital Assets and Media Librarian at the Corcoran Library facilitated the planning of the meeting. After a continental breakfast in the atrium of the Gallery of Art, the two groups were welcomed by Corcoran Library Director, Mario Ascencio. We were then treated to a tour of the Corcoran Library and viewed selections from the artistsí books collection. This was followed by a lively discussion with the Corcoran Library Staff: Mario Ascencio, Jacqueline Protka, Patricia L. Reid (Technical Services Associate), and Shawana Snell (Circulation Manager). Business meetings for the two groups were held, followed by lunch. The afternoon featured a tour of the exhibit: Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change led by Curator Philip Brookman. At the end of the day, Mario Ascencio welcomed us at a reception held at his house in the Adamís Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. More recently, the Mid-Atlantic Chapter met on Friday, October 22 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, VA. This meeting was held in conjunction with the 2010 Joint Annual Conference of SECAC and MACAA on October 20-23, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Members from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter and the Southeast Chapter were in attendance at the conference. Other colleagues from both Chapters joined us for the afternoon meeting at the VMFA. We had a tour of the VMFA library and archives followed by business meetings in the Best CafÈ at the Museum.

Chapter members were involved in planning and participating in two sessions at the SECAC conference. Geographic Divide and Pedagogical Shift: A Re-examination of W–lfflinian Methodologies in Art History chaired by Sarah Falls, New York School of Interior Design and Macie Hall, Johns Hopkins University included presentations by Patricia Cossard, University of Maryland and Kim Detterbeck, Frostburg State University: Quantum Comparitists: Knowledge Basesas an Instructional Methodology for the 21st Century; Macie Hall, Johns Hopkins University: Interactive Image Mapping: A New Pedagogical Approach for the Visual Arts; Martina Hesser, San Diego Mesa College: YouTube and Art History; and Caleb Smith, Columbia University: Mapping Gothic France. A second session, VRC: United We Stand: Forging Partnerships in Support of the Digital Classroom was chaired by Jeannine Keefer, University of Richmond and included presentations by Nancy Shelton, Old Dominion University: Creating Video Tours; Corinne Diop, James Madison University and Christina Updike, James Madison University: Teaching with Technology = Teamwork; and Jeannine Keefer, University of Richmond: Finding 20th Century Architecture in Richmond.

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

The Northern California Chapter held their fall meeting at Stanford University on November 19. This was a joint meeting with the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), Northern California chapter. A panel of speakers presented on the topic of copyright issues and applications in libraries and museums today. The speakers were Mimi Calter, Assistant University Librarian & Chief of Staff, Stanford University Libraries, Anne Bast, Intellectual Property Associate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Jason Schultz, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). The presentations will be made available soon on the VRA NoCal chapter Blog . The presentations and questions from the audience were informative and thought provoking. After the presentations, chapter members took a tour of the Stanford Art & Architecture Library and Visual Resources Center. Peter Blank, library director, demoed the libraryís Website, created with Drupal, and presented highlights from their artistís book collection.

The co-chairs of the Northern and Southern California chapters have initiated planning for a statewide 2-day mini-conference in Santa Barbara in June of 2011 with workshops and presentations.

Pacific Rim Chapter News
Submitted by Jeanette Mills (University of Washington)

The Pacific Rim Chapter held its annual meeting on Saturday, October 2nd, in Portland, OR. Debra Royer hosted us in the beautiful Crumpacker Family Library at the Portland Art Museum. We enjoyed several informal presentations: Karin Whalen (our chapter travel award recipient) spoke about the VRA 2010 conference; Joshua Polansky (recipient of the Kathe Hicks Albrecht Travel Award) talked about his experience as a first-time VRA conference attendee; and Morgan Bell shared information she learned at and provided her feedback about SEI 2010. We also had a lengthy time for open discussion about professional topics. Several of us then visited the Oregon Historical Society Research Library as part of the Oregon Archives Crawl. In November, we completed voting for our next chapter chair. The unanimous winner was Joshua Polansky, Director, Visual Resources Collection, College of Built Environments, University of Washington. He will serve for 2011 and 2012.

Texas Chapter News
Submitted by Katherine Moloney (Amon Carter Museum of American Art)

VRA-TX recently held the fall meeting at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Chapter members participated in a presentation by Kathleen Keating, Professor, University Libraries, and Cindy Abel Morris, Manager of the Bunting Visual Resources Library, both of the University of New Mexico, on the design and implementation of an online statistical database that now serves the entire University of New Mexico library community. An in-depth discussion on the usage of statistics to support and promote your own projects as well as ideas on strengthening your position in the workplace took place over lunch and after the business meeting. Many thanks are offered to Katherine Hooker and Holly Sabiston for volunteering to serve on the nominating committee and to all of the attendees for taking the time to support our chapter.