Visual Literacy, visual resources & the role of the librarian: Trinity or Triage?
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•350 views
This presentation was delivered at the Art Libraries Society UK & Ireland (ARLIS) annual conference in Cardiff on Friday 17 July 2015.
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (6)
Similar to Visual Literacy, visual resources & the role of the librarian: Trinity or Triage?
Similar to Visual Literacy, visual resources & the role of the librarian: Trinity or Triage? (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Visual Literacy, visual resources & the role of the librarian: Trinity or Triage?
- 1. Visual Resources Centre Visual Literacy, visual resources & the role of the librarian/ curator – Trinity or triage? Vicky Brown, Visual Resources Curator & Jenny Godfrey, Academic Librarian Art and Design 17 July 2015
- 3. Visual Resources Centre Government Art Collection, Queens Yard, Tottenham Court Road, London
- 12. Visual Resources Centre Thank you! E: victoria.brown@hoa.ox.ac.uk W: http://www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/resources/visual-resources- centre.html W: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/x/njGFAy Twitter: @oxfordarthist & @VickyBrownVRC LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/pub/victoria-brown/27/967/a4b/
- 13. Visual Resources Centre ACADI (Association of Curators of Art and Design Images: acadi.wordpress.com/ ; facebook.com/pages/ACADI/577333092289534 New York Times article (February 27, 2015): mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/learning/2015/02/27/10-intriguing-photographs-to-teach- close-reading-and-visual-thinking-skills/ ARLIS VRC VL event: arlis.org.uk/content/event-art-seeing-teaching-visual-literacy-library- and-classroom LiLAC (Librarians’ Visual Literacy Annual Conference: lilacconference.com/ Bodleian Libraries iSkills: bodleian.ox.ac.uk/using/skills Ashmolean University Engagement Programme: ashmolean.org/departments/uep/about/ Government Art Collection: gac.culture.gov.uk/ How Picasso helps to solve a murder case, Amy Herman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxZk0dh7WoQ Philip Yenawine & VTS: https://vimeo.com/51146289 New York Times’ The Learning Network blog (“What’s going on in this picture?”): learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/whats-going-on-in-this-picture-oct-22-2012/
Editor's Notes
- Thanks to ARLIS for the opportunity to speak today at this, their annual conference in Cardiff. This section of the afternoon session is a collaborative effort with my colleague, Jenny Godfrey. Jenny is presenting virtually a talk originally given for the VRA conference in Denver earlier on this year – and I am acting as the vocal equivalent of her amanuensis!
- Jenny works at Cardiff Met and I am at Oxford.
- I also recently spent three months on secondment to the Government Art Collection in London. That gave me new insight into what’s happening in the museums and galleries world when it comes to visual literacy and also how museums are dealing with vast libraries of analogue resources. As well as being members of ARLIS and having worked together on ARLIS’ Visual Resources Committee, Jenny and I are also members of the ACADI community– the Association of Curators of Art and Design Images – our connection to John at MMU - and of the international organisation, the VRA – Visual Resources Association. Over many years we have seen our profession evolve and our paths have continued to cross. I am delighted to have worked with Jenny to share with you this afternoon a snap shot of how visual literacy has evolved for us as VR curators, librarians and educators. It’s intended that this section of the session is going to tap into the broader conference themes of “engagement”, “adding value to our collections” and “mining resources” But it’s also going (I hope) to be two-way traffic and (please indulge me here) you are going to have to do some work in what I realise is the final session of a very busy and hopefully fulfilling conference! So without further ado….
- So then – I’d like to start with this… Firstly, have any of you seen this image before? For any that have and know the background, please work with me here and try to view it with fresh eyes! I am going to ask three specific questions – these are not mine, I might add and I will explain more in due course: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? ‘Answer’ = Quote “A child jumps on the waste products that are used to make poultry feed as she plays in a tannery at Hazaribagh (Huhjareebaag) in Dhaka, Bangladesh on Oct. 9, 2012. Luxury leather goods sold across the world are produced in a slum area of Bangladesh’s capital where workers, including children, are exposed to hazardous chemicals and often injured in horrific accidents, according to a study released on Oct. 9. None of the tanneries, packed cheek-by-jowl into Dhaka’s Hazaribagh neighborhood, treat their waste water, which contains animal flesh, sulphuric acid, chromium and lead, leaving it to spew into open gutters and eventually the city’s main river.”
- To contextualise this, it’s an image from the New York Times. Posted back in February of this year which is when I first saw it and the article it appeared in highlights 10 of the most popular photos published by the paper as part of its What’s going on in this picture initiative – a feature that actually dates back to October 2012 in which the NYT has worked collaboratively with a company called VTS – Visual Thinking Strategies – co-founded by Philip Yenawine (formerly Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art). This is an example of how visual literacy is being embedded now in the school curriculum, not just within the US, but around the world. The last picture for this ‘school year’ was posted on 2 June 2015. On each occasion, students are asked to consider the three questions that I asked you just now: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? Here in fact is Philip in action: https://vimeo.com/51146289 But why are we doing this on a Friday afternoon at an ARLIS conference? Well, reading about the NYT and VTS project made me question how well we are addressing visual literacy as a pedagogy within the UK and more specifically within HE, apart from the more obvious arenas such as picture analysis in an art history classroom. We as librarians and curators have our own role to play in this arena and Jenny’s talk is an excellent example of someone forging ahead and actively teaching and encouraging VL at her institution as you will hear in a moment.
- So then what is happening in the library and VL world in the UK? You probably know about CILIP’s dedicated Information Literacy Group who run an annual conference called LiLAC - the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference - I expect many of you have indeed attended these. Now maybe surprisingly, there was a distinct lack of visual literacy appearing in this year’s programme – in fact the only image specific session was presented by a representative from ARTstor and 4 individuals from Oxford and Cambridge Universities who all work in disciplines heavily reliant on images – art history and architecture. In fact, three of us may even be in this room this afternoon…. ARLIS itself has also explored VL….
- In June of last year, the Visual Resources Committee organised a study day devoted to visual literacy. Two of the speakers at this event were Georgina Dimmock from the University of Northampton and Peter Wright from Nottingham Trent University, both in the UK. Georgina has been actively campaigning in her own institution and beyond for better visual literacy training as far back as 2007, and received funding to attend the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) Conference back in 2010. She discovered that as a librarian at this conference, she was certainly in the minority but as a library professional spanning the School of the Arts and the School of Science and Technology she was not. Nonetheless, each discipline represented had it’s own ‘slant’ on visual literacy. As a part of her current role as Head of Academic Liaison, she provides visual literacy training for the Business and Design students. Peter describes himself as (quote) “a recovered slide curator who now teaches the courses he used to provide images for” (end quote)! He is in fact now a Senior Lecturer in Design, Culture and Context and his talk focused on the significant role of images in communication; the degree of complexity now associated with this; how we decode the multiplicity of images that surround us and how he perceives that students of visual culture deal with these ambiguous interpretations – from the use of Google images to more specialist resources, some of which we have already heard about in this session this afternoon. Here then are two examples of visual literacy being embedded in the Higher Education curriculum, all be it noteworthy that they are within what we describe in the UK as “New Universities”.
- Back in my home institution – the University of Oxford – we are making our own cautious in-roads into teaching visual literacy. The Bodleian Libraries have a training programme rolled out to all staff and students and my colleague, the librarian for Art History and Architecture and I run central and subject specific sessions (across all academic disciplines) introducing all members of the University to the image resources specifically available to them while they are at the University including the analogue collections I care for in the History of Art Department where I am based but also those available on the open web. I also guide History and History of Art students in the use of images and this involves teaching them to be visually critical of the sources they are accessing – including of course the ubiquitous Google Image search! Meanwhile, the museums are providing their own take on VL: the Ashmolean currently has a programme being taught by four teaching curators entitled the Ashmolean University Engagement Programme which exists (and I quote) “to enhance the impact of cross-disciplinary teaching and learning through objects.” Now this by extension relates to visual literacy, encouraging many of the skills outlined in the Association of College & Research Libraries or ACRL’s Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy that you may well be familiar with. As I mentioned before, my brief time working at the Government Art Collection or GAC also introduced me to some visual literacy initiatives that have taken place there
- The GAC has, and I quote: “Works of art ..... displayed in UK Government buildings in nearly every capital city, making it the most dispersed collection of British art in the world. The role of the Collection is to promote British art while contributing to cultural diplomacy.” GAC currently employs c.16 people, so it’s a relatively small team and as such as no dedicated education department. A visitor survey back in 2009 revealed that their core demographic of visitors were aged 45-65, with no visitors under the age of 18. In 2011, one of the Curators for Information & Research (Modern & Contemporary), Chantal Condron, who had been carrying out her own research into good practice in museums, suggested setting up a pilot literacy project with a local school, incorporating images from the GAC. Having highlighted a potential project with year 6 students (aged 10-11) who were already working on the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, she worked with the teachers to select works from the collection that matched the text and themes. Some of the vocabulary in the poem was alien to these kids, so she tried to incorporate images that would help break down the language barriers, for example, William Nicholson’s ‘O’ is for Ostler, a hand-coloured woodcut dating from 1897. 40-50 kids visited the gallery and took part in a two-part session; looking at the works displayed and also a practical session involving sketching materials – which they used to create mono-prints back at the school. The project culminated in a display of the children’s work in the gallery in July of 2012 Hot on the heals of this project came a larger literacy programme spanning 6 primary schools the following year... But that’s another story that we don’t have time for today...... So these are just a few examples of activity related to visual literacy cropping up across the UK – both in Higher Education and a significant number in the museum sector and also in schools – and I am very much hoping that some of the audience will be able to highlight some other instances, if we have time at the end of this session. Of course, John and Kristin have also talked about the important role that analogue collections still have to play in HE and how they can creatively be put to new uses. Telling the story of these collections is an important part of our visual literacy, how our use and access to visual materials has evolved and continues to do so, how we “promote” and “add value” to them (two more of our conference themes). There are doubtless many other as yet untapped ways to which we can apply our unique visual analogue resources, to better develop research and visual analytical skills – but we can only do this is we preserve and promote what’s left of them! And speaking of more activity, before we hear from Jenny and what she has been up to here in Cardiff, I would like to introduce you to the work of one other person who is applying visual analysis to other sectors that we might not have as yet considered….solving crimes! Here’s Amy Herman: https://youtu.be/RxZk0dh7WoQ Ok – food for thought. How can we find new ways to use our collections? To apply our skills in different ways? Well hopefully I and my fellow speakers in this session have given you some ideas. But we are not done yet!
- Let’s come back closer to home – in fact to Cardiff itself – to hear from Jenny, what she has been up to at her institution and her latest foray into the world of visual literacy.... and the controversy of baby cages! Jenny has since updated this version of her presentation (that she had hoped to deliver in person this afternoon) and has given us permission to circulate her amended PPT to this audience, so we can circulate it after the conference. http://cardiffmet.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=5523e120-4184-48e9-a46f-2f9ccb014993
- & to finish, here’s the Pathé newsreel that Jenny refers to… https://youtu.be/NerS17sC0Bg