"THROWING THE CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS: Keeping Visual Resources Positions Viable through the Digital Transition" - opening remarks from Karen Kessel, Sonoma State University at VRA 27, San Diego.

1. THROWING THE CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS:
Keeping Visual Resources Positions Viable through the Digital Transition
Karen Kessel, Sonoma State University
We have conceived our presentation as a sequel to the excellent session put
together by our California colleagues in the University of California system,
Maureen Burns and Vickie O’Riordan, for the VRA Conference in
Baltimore in 2006, entitled, “Damned if We Do and Damned if We Don’t”
that addressed the dramatic changes in our daily work.
The participants in the 2006 panel made the points that our jobs now involve
more participation in policy making as we work with administrators to plan
for implementation and maintenance of classroom technology and image
delivery systems. This requires leadership, business management, and
educational technology skills as well as an understanding and knowledge of
specialized software and standardized vocabularies. Digital images, unlike
slides, need to be manipulated in order to be utilized. We now help people
use the images in addition to finding them. The panel provided the
suggestions that we avoid adopting a defensive posture, but instead learn
how to help faculty, students and other patrons navigate online resources
rather than try to compete with them, and build on our strengths, which are
our specialized expertise, our collections that are tailored to our patrons’
needs, a commitment to sharing resources, and our role of providing local
service for people’s spontaneous needs and demands.
Most of us provide images within varying time constraints: for the user who
needs them right now in a lecture, for the next semester, and for general
development of collections. As we let go of the tasks of refiling slides, there
should be more time to go back to records catalogued hastily and do them

2. right. There may even be time to develop some more creative learning tools
to present information more dynamically.
The CSU is one of the largest university systems in the country. Since the
Visual Resources position has shifted in different directions at several
campuses in recent years, we thought that a snapshot of how the position is
treated in our system would provide a vista of the future for our profession
in higher education. Our example, I think, shows the importance of proving
ourselves viable or facing extinction. This week, on the VRA-L discussion
list, Greg Reser remarked that the more obstacles we throw at faculty
regarding the use and cataloging of our collections, the more likely faculty
will resort to finding images on their own.
Our title comes from Dustin Wees, who, when we invited him to represent
ARTStor on our panel, quoted a friend who suggested that inviting him
would be like throwing the cat among the pigeons. For many years the Slide
Curator was a fairly stable position in the CSU for those campuses that had
this position. In both of the institutions for which I have worked, UNLV in
Nevada, and SSU, faculty members with whom I worked claimed
responsibility for having created the position 30 years ago in order to free
the faculty from spending so much of their time having to find and prepare
the images to illustrate their lectures. On campuses where our
administrations have not provided support to develop digital image delivery
systems, yet have installed projection equipment in the classrooms, faculty
are taking it upon themselves to go out and find images themselves, surfing
the net and buying their own scanners, thereby putting themselves back in
the boat they were in thirty years ago and at the same time obviating our

3. usefulness to them. Where administrations and faculty have supported
digital initiatives, we have the opportunity to evolve with the technology.
Our panel begins with a summary of the situations on the 13 of 23 campuses
that still have Visual Resources Curators, where one curator with 28 years of
experience was summarily laid off by her dean with 3 months notice, while
at another campus the same position was elevated to the title of Information
Technology Consultant at a 50% higher salary than we currently enjoy. Our
second speaker, Dustin Wees, the cat of our title (or is he a pigeon in cat’s
clothing?) will tell us how he migrated from being an art historian to a slide
curator and then to being a pioneer with ARTStor. A representative from
Gallery Systems, a company that specializes in designing software for art
databases, will demonstrate how some of the skills we learn can evolve into
careers if we do not limit ourselves, and alternatively, how those of us who
remain in academia can outsource some of our tasks to contractors with
computing skills as we are becoming coordinators and designers of image
delivery systems. Finally, an education director for a museum will describe
how she collaborated with specialists in technology to create innovative
tools to describe objects from unfamiliar cultures for the museum audience
to help them learn what these objects represent and how they are used. This
can be a model for what we can do beyond Power Point presentations to
enliven the study of art history in the classroom and the museum.
One of the attractions for me twenty-five years ago when I entered this
occupation, and I suspect for many others, was the opportunity to organize
an independent collection tailored to the specific needs of its clientele. The
need to tailor our collections to our users has not changed. It is what still

4. makes us viable. But we no longer have the luxury of being autonomous.
We do have the opportunity to tap into a richer realm of resources by
making our collections shareable, integrating them with resources like
ARTStor, and by exploring new methods of delivering information about the
objects we document.
Lilla Sweatt, the recently retired Visual Resources Specialist at our San
Diego campus, was scheduled to present an overview of the Visual
Resources position’s status in the CSU, but she is ill and cannot attend.
Malka Helfmann will take her place. Malka Helfmann has been the Visual
Resources Curator at the Hayward campus, which is now called CSU East
Bay, for 10 years. She completed a Master’s degree at that campus in
Multimedia Studies and will complete a MLIS degree at San Jose State
University this spring. She will describe the results of a survey that Lilla
Sweatt conducted to compare the current duties, description, and job titles of
the Visual Resources Specialist positions at each of our 13 campuses that
have the position.
Dustin Wees is our next speaker. Looking at his resumé, it is no surprise
that his career path has led him to ARTStor. He has experience not just in
visual resources, but also in teaching art history, lecturing, organizing
museum exhibitions, and co-authoring two exhibition catalogs. After
teaching art history for four years at Skidmore College, he was the
photograph and slide librarian at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute for 26 years, where he supervised five employees. He designed the
collection’s first database and then revised its structure to enable the sharing
of data with another slide collection and two museum databases. He

5. represented the library in collaborative projects with the Williams College
art department, the center for computing, and the Museum of Art. Since the
1990’s Dustin has served on and chaired the VRA’s Data Standards
Committee and presented several papers on the committee’s work in
developing the Core Categories. In 2000, he coordinated a special project
for the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia
University’s Visual Resources Collection of a half million slides to redesign
the collection’s database to make it more accessible and shareable with
campus-wide initiatives.
Robb Detlefs is the Director of Product Management for Gallery Systems,
the company which designed TMS, the Museum System, a database
management software which many museums utilize for their collections.
They acquired and also distribute Embark, a database program for art images
originally tested at our San Jose campus art department. Robb became
fascinated by computer programming while majoring in Chinese studies as
an undergraduate. His family had a historical consulting business. He
developed a program to help keep track of the files, retrieve data, and back
up their project files. He also wrote a book on local history. While
attending library school, he became involved in the Embark database pilot
project at San Jose State with Dr. Kathy Cohen, and eventually went to work
with the company that produced it, Digital Arts and Sciences. He will tell
you more about his experiences.
Sheila Pressley is the Director of Education for the Fine Arts Museum of
San Francisco. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History and has taught
upper division classes at San Francisco State University. She has produced

6. gallery guides and training materials for school teachers. She currently
supervises twenty-seven different programs to serve museum visitors of all
ages, reaching an audience of a quarter million people annually. Her
subjects range from American painting to traditional African sculpture,
ancient Egyptian art, and Teotihuacan murals of central Mexico. She
specializes in interpreting non-Western art. She is active in community arts
education projects and groups. She designed the educational spaces and
programs for the new Herzog and de Meuron building in Golden Gate Park
which opened in 2005. Her Collection Icons multimedia installation
received an award from the American Association of Museums. She will
describe this project.
Sheryl Frisch has been the art department curator at the CSU’s San Luis
Obispo campus for 15 years. For several years now the CSU curators have
met together at least annually. We collaborated on a shared image database
called CIELO. Sheryl is the chair of our group. She coordinates our
listserv, organizes our meetings, and serves as liason between the CSU
system and the curators. She will provide a response to our other speakers.