VRA 2021 virtualChicago

$20.00 for conference attendees | Limited to 75 participants.
Register for this workshop through the conference online registration

(Adding this workshop to your schedule on Sched does not guarantee registration.)
A "Let's Play" is a video that documents the playthrough of a video game focused on the subjective experience of the gamer, often with humorous, irreverent, or critical commentary. This "Let's Play" will walk participants through the process of using OpenRefine's LOC Reconciliation tools. Unlike a workflow guide or step-by-step documentation, this video will offer participants a real-life example of prepping data and implementing this powerful tool.

The format will be a prerecorded video followed by a detailed and interactive live Q&A with workshop participants. Attendees will recieve a version of the data set ahead of the workshop in order to follow along or to play around with afterwards. A recording of the entire session, including the Q&A, will be emailed to all registered participants afterwards.

It is recommended that participants have some familiarity with OpenRefine, as this presentation will not include detailed instructions on installing the tool, setting up a project, nor basic manipulation of data.

$40.00 for conference attendees | Limited to 30 participants.
Register for this workshop through the conference online registration

Would you like to improve your understanding of visuals, improve the impact of your presentations, and better remember content?    
This four-hour workshop will engage participants in a variety of techniques to better use visuals in capturing and presenting information. Participants will investigate and learn about the power of visual communication and how it improves our processing and retention of information. Hands-on activities like how to take visual notes (sketchnoting), mindmapping, and other drawing exercises (no artistic ability is necessary - really!), will be demonstrated so participants can better remember information, share knowledge with others, and communicate ideas more engagingly.

$30.00 for conference attendees | Limited to 25 participants.
Register for this virtual workshop through the conference online registration

This workshop focuses on the concepts of digital accessibility and accessible design practices, and the tools and strategies we can use when creating digital projects to be sure we are making them useful to as many people as possible. This year has seen a necessary focus on virtual teaching and resource creation - how are accessibility needs being considered?

Let's 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!). 

In 2020, most if not all of us went from working in an office to working at home in the blink of an eye, forcing us to immediately pivot into new practices and approaches to our professional roles. From assisting faculty and students with the transition to online teaching to managing our collections from a distance, we all rose to the challenge of our new “normal,” transforming our day-to-day work in the process. And while some of these changes may be temporary, others will permanently impact how VR professionals approach their facilities, patrons, and practices. This roundtable discussion is designed to help us engage with and process these changes, with an eye to how we have met these challenges and thrived. Through a series of short, lightening round talks by speakers from a range of institutional roles and via lively discussion we will explore what has changed and what remains core to our work, addressing enhanced responsibilities; the use of new tools; innovative changes to our services; cultivating connections with patrons in a remote environment; safely transitioning back to the office; and what changes we anticipate to the profession and our professional lives moving forward based on the experience gleaned from working at home.       Endorsed by the VRA Education Committee

Andrea Degener, "Hidden Treasures: Managing Remote Staff to Enhance Image Accessibility" How do you collectively manage 30 library staff who have been tasked with cataloging an archival collection in JSTOR Forum? Being assigned to train staff, who have no experience with the interface or metadata standards, can be an extremely daunting ask. In March, we were asked to co-lead such a project. The sudden rise of COVID-19 also required us to set up the project and train staff in less than a week.         The JSTOR Forum project included 130,000 digital assets that required metadata enhancements. The collection, The Walt Reed Illustration Archive, is available in the Artstor Public Collections and was digitized as part of a CLIR Grant completed in 2018. Library staff were responsible for adding titles, dates, subject terms and descriptions to their assigned image sets. After working on the project for a month, over 3,000 records received metadata enhancements.        We were able to use the Walt Reed Illustration Archive digitized materials to create a robust project for library staff. This presentation is aimed to explore the challenges and triumphs of using digital collections as a way to create remote projects for staff. We will also explore the emotional labor involved in reimagining this project at a very challenging time. 

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me" will gather a diverse range of GLAM professionals to discuss financial/compensation transparency and how it relates to the field. It will generate a fruitful discussion surrounding compensation at various points in one’s career and across the field at large.  Everyone is encouraged to attend. Students and emerging professionals in particular will leave feeling empowered with strategies to navigate employment and managers/administrators will gain insight into potential discrepancies and inequities. Q&A will be taken at the end.

Archives are abundant sources for image content, with many of those digital objects being unique to their holding institution.  The current environment has archivists serving a burgeoning demand throughout society. Users’ increased requests have archivists honing their metadata skills to provide better access to individual archival items in digital formats. This increased need for access to images in cultural heritage collections creates challenges for archivists to not only provide reference access but also to maintain the integrity and security of their collections. Copyright and permissions in the age of digital reproduction have also added to the responsibilities placed upon those who catalog, manage, and provide reference access to archival images.    This discussion spotlights the ways that visual resources are collected and used in archives.  Speakers/discussion leaders will come from a variety of archives (photography, university, corporate, government, and museums). Together we will lead a facilitated discussion on our challenges and successes in working with digital images, dialoguing about the areas where visual resources disciplines intersect.

Rachel Jaffe & Jess Waggoner, "Building User-focused Digital Collections" Upon review of images in our legacy campus photographs collection into UCSC’s new Samvera-based DAMS, we had a breakthrough moment.  Many of the individual photographs we had ingested clearly belonged to the same event, and most shared identical metadata records. However, the duplicated metadata was not always accurate to a specific image. In examining a set of 21 images of a faculty member and his students, all the images shared the title “Professor X and students.”  However, Professor X doesn’t appear in all the images. As a user, unaware of a photograph of a young woman’s relationship to the whole, I might be very confused. This and other observations led us to consider: How could we better package or present these photos without having to go back and provide unique title and metadata records? What if we bundled these groups of like images together as an “event” set associated with a single parent metadata record? What if we could improve user experience by changing the structure of our digital objects and collections? While these questions arose from a metadata perspective, they dovetailed cleanly with the findings of our undergraduate user testing. This new strategy, designing for optimal usability, not only represents a radical shift in how we are thinking about our objects and their metadata, it enables us to better meet the needs of our undergraduate students by providing desired greater context, reducing cognitive overload, and aiding them in distinguishing the “best” or most representative images.

Devon Murphy, "Critical Metadata: Re-examining Data Transformation " Data transformation tools such as Open Refine and Tableau are increasingly being used by GLAM professionals to process metadata relating to visual collections. However, critical analysis of their usage is limited, especially in relation to critical cataloging or non-Western information protocols. This paper and related demonstration of an Open Refine workflow aims to examine how GLAM professionals can employ critical cataloging practices alongside these tools, as well as their limits. This paper will first introduce the highlighted data transformation tool, Open Refine, and its applications to cataloging/metadata work, then move to a discussion of current critical cataloging best practices. The paper will then culminate in a demonstration of a workflow combining critical cataloging best practices within data transformation, prepping it for use in a catalog, finding aid, or controlled vocabulary. (Examples can include but are not limited to LGBTQ+ artists, Native American artists and art terms).

Meghan Rubenstein will present “The Results Are in: What the Solo SIG Community Is Today.” In an effort to revive the VRA Solo SIG, Lael Ensor-Bennett and Meghan Rubenstein distributed a survey in the fall of 2020 to learn if there was still interest in this group. By definition, solo visual information professionals generally have no professional peers within their immediate department. They often serve as the head of the library or visual collection and may have temporary or part-time support staff such as assistants, interns, student workers, or volunteers. Solo professionals are found in all types of GLAM related organizations including special libraries, art and architecture school libraries, museum libraries, branch libraries, academic departments, and independent agencies.
In this short presentation, she will summarize the results of the survey, which gives us a good idea of what, and who, the solo community is today. Questions ranged from type of employment and job responsibilities to the main challenges of the solo professional. Since distributing the survey, the Solo SIG has started meeting bi-monthly and begun brainstorming how the group can best support each other. If you are unsure if this is your community, come learn more about its members. If you are already a member, come learn more about your community!

Lael Ensor-Bennett will present “Delegation, Efficiency, and Compassion during a Solo Covid-19: Recalibrating the Duties of Student Employees.” While continuing the transition to being the sole staff member of the Johns Hopkins University Visual Resources Collection, the immediate change to remote staff work in March of 2020 around the country and here in Maryland left the VRC undergraduate and graduate student employees without access to their usual projects or clear guidelines for whether they would be allowed to work and myself without the ability to delegate many of the usual tasks. After several weeks of university wide policy revisions, the VRC was able to begin assigning remote work to students. As the pandemic progressed, certain technological hurdles were overcome, allowing a wider range of remote work to be available to the students; however, this work also needed to continuously take into account the reduced bandwidth of both staff and students. During this time, Ensor-Bennett has aimed to strike a balance between new and traditional student work that is relevant and useful to the VRC without adding work to her own workload, act in compassion for herself and her student employees and still complete necessary work, and realign the possible student work activities with her changed tasks in light of Covid-19.

Malia Van Heukelem will present “Leveraging Collections Management and Student Learning in an Academic Archive.” Museum studies and Library Information Science students seek out hands-on experience in special collections and archives; this past year has seen many host institutions cease in-person work. Van Heukelem aims to create opportunities for students while making progress in collections stewardship, matching student interests with collection priorities.

Cindy Frank will present “Architects of Color: The challenges of finding images to document their work.” Frank’s image collection supports the teaching of Architecture to both undergraduates and graduates. In an effort to broaden the holdings of the image collection and to support a more in depth teaching of architectural history Frank went looking for images of works by architects of color in the journals University of Maryland subscribes to, and the books on library shelves. There have been challenges, both from the pandemic, and from available materials.

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.

We propose a panel to discuss an educational art documentation project. The panelists were all students in an Art Documentation MLIS course at Simmons University in the fall of 2019. During the course, students learn about various procedures, tools, and standards used for art documentation in libraries, archives, and museums. The course culminates in students working in small groups to identify a series of three public artworks for detailed description. Public artworks are defined loosely, and may include municipal artworks in public spaces, street art, or graffiti art. Public art, as defined above, was chosen because it is less frequently documented formally in institutional records. These artworks also pose several challenges  in description, including, but not limited to: discovering proper artist attribution information; how to list names of artists who may prefer anonymity; determining when artworks were created, installed, modified, etc.; measuring works, some quite large and/or complex; photographically documenting works and their surroundings; and complexities of subject description.  Students were asked to choose a standard for description of their chosen set of works, and to defend their choice of standard. They were also asked to consider the social implications of the description they would provide, based on the history (if known), conditions of creation, and public response to the artworks. Each group presented a summary of their work with their complete records, their rationale for descriptive choices, and how they met the challenges listed above.

We’ll share a recap of 2020, including how we helped institutions and students meet the challenges of remote teaching, a roundup of the new content we released (much of it free), and share findings and future plans for our pilot program of Artstor images on JSTOR.

In this session Andreas Knab from vrcHost will share updates made to the MDID3 application over the past year, including the 2020 MDID 3.5 release. 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.

The online event will be live-streamed and open to the public. However, only registered conference attendees will be able to participate in the Q&A following the talk.

Steven De'Juan Booth (he/him) is an archivist, researcher, and co-founder of the Blackivists, a collective of trained Black memory workers who provide expertise on archiving and preservation practices to communities in the Chicagoland area.
His work and research interests include born-digital audiovisual materials, Black cultural heritage preservation, community archives, and digital scholarship. Steve has worked for National Archives and Records Administration since 2009 and currently manages the audiovisual collection for the Barack Obama Presidential Library. He previously held positions at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and JPMorgan & Chase cataloging the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is actively involved in the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and has served on the governing board of the organization. He has given talks at the Library of Congress, Bentley Historical Library, and Brown University's Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.
From 2019-2020, Steven worked alongside Stacie Williams (the University of Chicago Libraries) as guest co-editor of Loss/Capture, an editorial project exploring the state of Black cultural archives in and beyond Chicago, presented by Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based arts publication and archiving initiative.
He is currently working on a book project with Barrye Brown (the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture) documenting the contributions and impact of African American archivists in SAA. He is also researching Black LGBTQIA spaces and newsletters published in the Midwest as sites and sources of knowledge production and sharing.
He is part of a long lineage of Black information professionals who have matriculated from Morehouse College (BA in Music) and Simmons College (MS in Library Science).

You can read more about his work on his website at http://www.stevendbooth.com/.

‘63 Boycott is a documentary film that connects the forgotten story of one of the largest northern civil rights demonstrations to contemporary issues around race, education, school closings, and youth activism. On October 22, 1963, more than 250,000 students boycotted the Chicago Public Schools to protest entrenched racial segregation. Unseen 16mm film footage of the march shot by director Gordon Quinn in 1963 formed the basis for the documentary that features interviews with civil rights leaders and follows activism at Chicago Public Schools through the present day.    This presentation will detail the unique collaboration between Kartemquin Films, Mikva Challenge, and Media Burn Archive to create interactive digital tools to enable teaching and learning with the body of footage shot and collected for ‘63 Boycott.    Creating access to a collection of never-before-seen footage provides students with the opportunity for meaningful and unique scholarship. Harnessing the power of archival footage, students will be able to make connections across time and space to tell nuanced, fact-based stories that showcase how today's struggles for social justice build on lived experience and enduring issues.      Participants will walk away from the session with a model for how archives can engage the public with collections of camera original footage; why rights holders should consider allowing re-use of their materials; and how educators can incorporate archival media into the classroom.

This SIG will follow up on previous work from 2019, building on the initial CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects) training videos. The new set of videos presents thematic cataloging examples and options —a request from attendees of the 2019 SIG.  The scenarios shown in the videos address issues with different works, collections, and user needs, as applied in several different popular cataloging tools. The examples highlight how CCO can be implemented in different systems, in combination not only with VRA Core and the Getty vocabularies, but also with other metadata standards. These videos will be presented for the attendees to discuss and critique as a focus group. Feedback from attendees will inform the work to edit and add to this series of training videos. Want to learn more about these issues, and also help shape relevant training materials? Join us!

Oral Histories have a rich tradition of providing an important contribution to our cultural heritage by preserving memory through recorded or documented narratives. As primary sources, oral histories help to contextualize studies in art, history, education, social sciences and other disciplines. In a time of continually shifting and expanding responsibilities for librarians and visual resources curators, it is not uncommon for those in our profession to be tasked with organizing and/or creating oral history (OH) content. For those of us who are not trained journalists, cultural anthropologists, or oral historians, overseeing an OH project can present multiple challenges: What pieces of information should be captured for future access? How do you ensure transcriptions are accurate? How do you handle copyright issues? How do you expand and improve access to existing OH content? Three presenters will discuss their OH projects and provide practical advice about dealing with some of the roadblocks in creating a coherent, accessible archive of audio/video recordings and transcriptions. The speakers will also share information about best practices and emphasize how their projects allowed them the opportunity to bring their unique perspectives on organizing and shaping these histories.

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.

How can intellectual property rights be leveraged, documented, and framed in order to hold up the rights of vulnerable communities, provide repatriations to them, and ensure their data security? As curators, archivists, and librarians who participate in documenting future histories and hidden histories, how do we include marginalized communities into the documentation of their own visual media histories? For this VRA 2021 conference session, presenters who work in archives, digital scholarship, and museums will share techniques, methodologies, and policies that consider vulnerable communities ownership of intellectual property rights when building digital archives, digital collections, and digital humanities projects.

Jackie Spafford & Sonja Sekely-Rowland, "Inter-agency Collaboration: Bringing together VRA and SAH preservation goals through an NEH grant-funded project"
Timing is everything: the presenters were notified of their successful application for a 2020-2022 NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Planning Grant just as the world went into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The good news/bad news clash has presented them with a number of unforeseen challenges. This paper will provide insight into both the initial project vision as well as necessary and ongoing adjustments, and will cover:

1. An overview of the project including background of the Society of Architectural Historians and its Color Film Emergency Project; the relationship to the VRA, especially the “Slide and Transitional Media Task Force”; internships and fellowships at UCR and UCSB that provided a model and proof of concept for this project.
2. Grant writing lessons learned in navigating institutional research requirements and economic development policies.
3. How the project goals and scope are being re-considered in response to pandemic travel restrictions and other COVID-related challenges.
4. Opportunities for collaborative partnerships with other VRA members.

John Burns, "Curation of an International Documentary Film Festival" Join the presenter in this session to learn how curation of a special collection can be accomplished regardless of format. The presenter works at an institution that hosts an international documentary film festival every fall on campus. The festival has run and grow over the last 10+ years. By taking the initiative to join a campus committee in charge of the festival, the presenter (a solo art and electronic resources librarian) ensured the acquisition of the films from each festival. Curating this collection from scratch meant volunteering to learn how to create DVD and Blu-Ray discs from filmmaker digital files, gathering all metadata for cataloging, preserving the digital film files, and created access to a new collection. It also meant leading the coordination of several key players across campus. Curation of any collection from scratch is no small task. Answers to the following questions and more will be discussed in the session. What format will yield the most use? HD vs. standard definition? How to preserve the digital film files? How to work with copyright releases? How to best facilitate discovery? What are the best practices for essential metadata for cataloging?

Krystyna Matusiak, "Building a Community Digital Archive in the Post-Custodial World"   Community archives are vital for preserving and documenting the regional heritage of groups and individuals. Local archives are often organized by volunteers and represent grassroots activities. In contrast to institutional archives, community archives are characterized by mixed acquisition and curation practices, often described as post-custodial, that separate physical custody from the digital representation.  In this approach, original materials are returned to community members after digital surrogates are created.   This presentation will discuss the formation of a rural community archive in Park County, Colorado, and the collaborative project aimed at sustaining it. The Park County Local History Archive was established by a group of volunteers who collected and digitized over 4,000 photographs and created 60 oral histories. This effort resulted in an archive composed of a mix of original photographs, digital surrogates, and born-digital content. The archive provides unique primary sources for researchers interested in the history of mining and railroads, or the challenges of rural life in the mountainous region.  The presenters will describe the community-based project and efforts made to continue the work of volunteers. This collaborative initiative involves re-digitizing the original photographs, converting oral histories, assessing copyright, assigning standardized rights statements from RightsStatements.org, and building a digital archive and exhibits in Omeka. The Digital Archive is available at https://pclha.omeka.net/ . This presentation will discuss the challenges of post-custodial practices and building a digital community archive, including re-scanning, evaluating the copyright status of historical materials, and working with digital donations. It will describe the strategies of working with a remote archive during the pandemic.

Michalle Gould, "Teaching Visual Literacy in the Context of Social Media" The Association of College and Research Libraries' Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education defines visual literacy as a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media." Individuals in fields that rely heavily on visual resources are more accustomed to analyzing and interpreting visual imagery; however, precisely because they are trained to value visual information, they may be more vulnerable to the mis-use of images on social media to provoke an emotional response.  In classes on Visual Rhetoric and Aesthetic, I have presented lessons on visual literacy as it applies to social media, discussing some of the ways that images can be misleading and presenting techniques for applying critical thinking to images presented as support for arguments related to social/political issues.  In this paper, I will discuss the importance of more widespread implementation of visual literacy instruction at the college level, and propose suggestions for how to integrate a greater focus on visual literacy into existing frameworks for information literacy instruction.

Dijia Chen, "the Unintended "Afterlife": The Presentation, Reproduction and Circulation of Exhibitionary Representations in Architectural Production" This paper traces the production, the presentation and the “afterlife” of an exhibited image in the 2001 exhibition “TUMU: Young Architecture of China.” While the photo was not included in the exhibition catalogue and occupied an inconspicuous spot on site, its wide circulation, repetitive reproduction and multiple interpretations in news reports, online discussions, and professional critiques have won quick reputation for the architect, resulting in domestic and international awards, exhibitions and new projects. The stunning representation of the façade reached out far beyond its maker’s intention and in turn shape the professional career of the architect in unexpected ways, even though the building itself was more immature than satisfactory as an early project, featuring a mundane floor plan and many practical problems in use. This research problematizes the process in which the complex body of architecture is negotiated in the displaced photographic representations by analyzing the texts and narratives from different cultural, language, geographic and temporal backgrounds that facilitated the unintended popularization of the image. While acknowledging the flattening of programmatic complexity, I see the image as an autonomous assemblage of meaning independent to architecture. Tracing the image’s impact on the career development of the architect, I argue that the project was not only recognized as an image, but also, consciously or unconsciously, designed as an exhibitionist building. The paper, therefore, further informs of the state of design specific to the early experimentations of contemporary Chinese architects, characterized by image-based media practices and transcultural communications.

Charlotte India Eagle, "Digital Legacy Building" Since the establishment of the first presidential library under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has put forth 13 subsequent presidential libraries each more idolatrous than the previous library to past leaders. This paper beings by analyzing the creation of the presidential library system and how it became a method of legacy building for past presidents. In looking at the historical policies, the paper goes on to suggest implications of the current shift to a digital library chosen by President Barack Hussein Obama and what this new system’s structure means for the future. Looking at proposed plans and current practices, this paper will address issues surrounding access, digitization policies, and historical significance of this new format for an all ready established system. In putting forth a digital library, the paper looks at whether or not this new structure established by (NARA) could be construed to create a legacy building digital footprint.

Discussion of the CONTENTdm Linked Data Pilot Project, a collaborative investigation exploring the creation, curation, and applied use of digital material linked data. This presentation will include inspiration for the work, a brief technical overview of the project, as well as a sneak peek at one of the pilot project’s most creative deliverables: the CONTENTdm Image Annotator. The presenters will demonstrate this new tool and its ability to enhance and deepen metadata description and its potential to increase the user’s understanding of digitized content. The presentation will conclude with a brief discussion of the pilot project’s impact and its potential to enhance and change CONTENTdm in the near future.

In the last two decades the role of the Visual Resources/Media Center has changed considerably. Several centers have been closed, and others have moved from departments to a central location such as the library or information resources. The irony in these changes is that visual resources professionals and the work they have been doing for the last two decades can now be employed in interpretive endeavors in addition to the collecting and delivery functions that have been their hallmark since the days of slides. This session will feature digital art history/digital humanities projects supported and guided by visual resources professionals. From the creation of digital exhibitions to timelines to maps to more sophisticated image and data analysis, VRA members are an integral source of support in these endeavors.    

Presenter 1: Catherine Adams, "In want of a dataset: Text Analysis and the VRC" Like many similar facilities, the Visual Resources Centre (VRC) at Penn State has been diversifying its mission as part of a Department of Art History. While the VRC staff and several graduate students have been actively exploring Digital Art History, the majority of faculty have not shown an interest in it. The field of art history also is lacking in one thing essential to most digital humanities projects: readily available datasets. In the Summer of 2019, the VRC started exploring the creation of a dataset compiled from the department’s list of awarded master’s and PhD theses but found it limiting. In Fall 2019, this problem was solved when the department head expressed an interest in creating a dataset from the CAA published listings of awarded PhDs. This much larger dataset could then be used in various text analysis projects. This paper will briefly explore the creation of the dataset, several text analysis tools, and questions for the future.

Presenter 2: Steve Tatum, “Exhibiting a Slide Collection: The Life and Career of Leonard J. Currie, FAIA” Leonard Currie headed the Virginia Tech architecture program, in Blacksburg, Virginia, from 1956 to 1962, where he was a seminal figure. After Currie’s death in 1996, his daughter left his slide collection with the Virginia Tech Art and Architecture Library, where Steve Tatum began scanning and cataloging it about ten years ago. The collection comprises 13,000 original slides chronicling Currie’s career in remarkable detail from studying with Gropius and Breuer at Harvard, through heading an Organization of American States program for low-cost housing in Bogotá, heading architecture programs at Virginia Tech and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and then settling into private practice in Blacksburg. Currie documented his slides meticulously throughout his career on the mounts and boxes. Cataloging has always required some research to understand his notations in English and Spanish. During the summer of 2020, Tatum expanded the research to interpret Currie’s career for a year-long exhibition in the Art and Architecture Library as well as a more thorough account published in WordPress.

Presenter 3: Tess Colwell, Catherine DeRose, and Lindsay King "Reimagining Yale's Visual Resource Collection using PixPlot" Yale University’s Arts Library Digital Services (ALDS) manages collections of legacy images related to global art, architecture, and material culture to support teaching and research in the arts and humanities. These images, which form the basis of Yale’s Visual Resources Collection, consist of more than 370,000 digital images items comprised of lantern slides, 35mm slides, and photographs. The collection contains a range of descriptive metadata, from comprehensive and detailed item-level information to minimal or no descriptive metadata. As the need and demand for a VRC slide library has evolved over the last decade, the ALDS staff have continued seeking new ways to make the materials more meaningful to students and faculty at Yale. In early 2020, ALDS staff submitted a Rapid Prototyping Grant with Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab to develop a humanities application utilizing the 370,000 images and metadata. Rapid Prototyping Grants support focused design and development interventions to help innovative digital humanities projects get started or to add a new feature to existing projects. During the grant period, the project team built a prototype of the platform PixPlot, using a sample of images and metadata from the VRC materials. This project aims to view the VRC images in PixPlot, where students can engage and interpret the images and metadata in new ways and at new scales, while also providing a broader perspective of pedagogical practices in Yale’s History of Art Department over the last 60 years. This collection of images is valuable mainly as a collection that has accumulated and grown over time. What can we learn about the collection by viewing it at scale? What can we learn about VRC collections across institutions? This type of work has not been done in the visual resources community, and we believe having a platform for other institutions to contribute or analyze VRC materials would provide a meaningful contribution to the field. This presentation will include context and background information, a demo of the prototype, and a discussion on next steps and what we can learn based on the project’s findings.

Endorsed by the Education Committee.

Shannon Willis & Marcia McIntosh, "The perils of complexity: A multi-stage study to determine necessary images for digitized scrapbook representation" The digitization of complex scrapbooks is a common problem faced by cultural heritage professionals. Unlike more standard bound works, scrapbooks are highly complex objects with multiple moving parts and numerous special features. Their makers attach a wide variety of material types (photographs, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, letters, ribbons, etc.) to the pages; many of the items attached to the pages fold out or can open to reveal more information, and some items are left unattached between pages. Given their complexity and variability, determining digitization standards for scrapbooks that will hold up across all manner of collections and accurately represent their unique elements in an understandable way in a digital environment can be challenging.     In order to answer the question of how to best represent scrapbook materials in a digital environment, librarians at the University of North Texas conducted a multi-stage study to assess national trends and user preferences for scrapbook representation. The stages of this study included a review of national trends in scrapbook digitization, as seen in the Digital Public Library of America; a paper-prototyping-inspired, in-person user study; and an online survey of user preferences. The results of this research have enabled the implementation of clear guidelines at the University of North Texas for scrapbook digitization that accounts for the user experience rather than strictly relying on personal opinion or local librarian consensus. The insights gained from this study can help other institutions working to digitize scrapbook materials or other complex items, as well. 

Maggie Downing, "Creating Digital Preservation Policies and Procedures" According to the IMLS 2019 report, “Protecting America’s Collections,” 84% of institutions preserving born-digital collections had no plan for digital preservation. This paper will discuss the importance of creating and maintaining digital preservation policies and procedures.     As a result of consistently changing standards, hardware, software, and file formats, digital assets are at a much higher preservation risk than conventional analog resources. New technologies and advancements require active organization and administration to preserve digital objects, particularly since the field is still developing. A digital preservation policy should state an institutional commitment to preserving digital objects, identify challenges and preservation goals, outline staff roles and responsibilities in digital preservation. Digital preservation procedures can the be developed based on the goals outlined in the policy.    This paper will discuss several procedural steps to consider in digital preservation, including: Creating a digital asset register; creating a plan for migration from old media; establishing a storage and backup plan; establishing standardized file formats and file naming protocols; and establishing metadata vocabularies and ingest workflows. 

Sarah Coe, "When to Say When: The Garvin Project" Alexander Garvin, an imminent professor of architecture, donated tens of thousands of his photographs  to be digitized and made available to the public, along with the funds to pay for it. Both metadata and photos were of varying quality, making automation difficult, but a workflow was established, and the collection was ingested. He then dropped off another hard drive of images. And another. Any organizing principles in the first batch were often ignored in the second, and integrating them presented a new crop of challenges. Through collaboration and the use of tools like OpenRefine, our own Garvinator tool, and a crowd-sourcing project, we are making progress, but with 18,600 folders and sub-folders and 340,000 images, when do you say “Enough”?

An opportunity to further conversation from that session as well as provide open discussion opportunities for members working in DH / DS.

Katherine Howells, "Enriching user engagement with digitised and non-digitised image collections through digital research and online exhibitions" This paper offers tangible and practical approaches to using catalogue data and digitised archival image more effectively to engage audiences online. It suggests how innovative research methods and software can be applied to different image collections so will be of interest to any attendee responsible for managing an image collection and improving public engagement. 

Have questions about starting out in the Visual Resources field? Interested in hearing other VRA members’ backstories? Join VREPS for an informal conversation with experienced professionals. 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 session presents an overview of a “curation-ready” workflow for digitized photographs that was implemented at the University of Notre Dame Archives. This workflow emerged as a response to the increased need for digitization services for campus stakeholders, faculty and students during the COVID-19 health crisis. Encompassing a holistic approach to digitization services, this session provides an overview of the workflow which includes digitization, pre-ingest preparation, ingest into a digital preservation system, and post-ingest work to ensure storage and discovery paths for preservation masters, access masters, and access proxies.  Borrowing from principles of data curation, this workflow integrates digital preservation methodology as well as data curation processes at the point of data creation to ensure “ready-access,” cost-effective and responsible stewardship of digital photo collections.

Over the past year, many inequities have risen to the surface for GLAM and visual resources professionals. The EAC continues to hold monthly Community Hours to address and navigate these issues and roadblocks (see http://vraweb.org/about/committees/equitableaction/). Our aim for this Hour is to both provide a narrative overview of the events and concerns of the past year, as well as an open space for members to communicate their current situations and suggestions for future solutions. We would like to capture the ways in which members are feeling unsupported and the ways in which we can actively contribute as a committee, an organization, and as a field.
We encourage attendees to bring answers to the following questions or send an email to ea@vraweb.org for anonymous questions (you may also use this form to tell the EAC your concerns related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility: https://bit.ly/38Y8nGZ):
What inequities have you faced or witnessed at your institution?
What are you most concerned about for yourself, your job, and for the field? Do you feel safe and supported in your current work environment?
How can we support each other locally, nationally, and as an organization? What do we need from each other to support each other in our roles and as a community/organization?
What can the EAC do for you? What can VRA? What changes does the field at large need to see?