The document discusses a student project to educate young Singaporeans about the importance of Total Defence. The project aims to explore why Total Defence is commemorated on the same date that Britain fell to Japanese forces. It also examines the different aspects of Total Defence and how it relates to Singapore's history. The students conducted research online, in libraries, and by visiting historical sites and asking guides. They learned about the importance of Total Defence for Singapore and why it was established. Creating the documentary helped the students better understand and share their knowledge on this topic.
The document discusses public speaking and its importance for careers and civic engagement. It explains that public speaking involves organizing thoughts logically and tailoring the message for the audience. While public speaking and casual conversation share similarities, public speaking requires a more formal structure, language, and delivery method. The document also discusses managing anxiety when speaking in public and the importance of preparation, visualization, and focusing on organized thinking.
Carolyn Caizzi and Barbara Rockenbach presentation for the "Collaborative Ventures, Collaborative Gains" session at the VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd Joint Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Jennifer Friedman presentation at the "How do we shelve it? The place for Vendor-provided electronic titles in art and architecture collections" session at the VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd Joint Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Steven Kowalik, Hunter College / CUNY
New York City presentation from VRA 28 Atlanta.
"Transition to Learning Spaces: Redefining Our Space for the Digital World" for the "After the Transition: Planning for Collections Storage & Workspace Changes in the Digital Environment" session.
Karen Kessel presentation for "More Than Meets the Eye? Retrieving Art Images by Subject" session at VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd joint conference in Minneapolis, MN.
The document discusses metadata schemas and workflows for cataloging digital assets. It provides examples of metadata schemas including Dublin Core and Photoshop XMP schemas. It also describes different organizations' processes for collecting metadata from faculty and students and integrating it into databases using tools like Photoshop and custom metadata panels. Custom metadata schemas are suggested to better fit specific needs rather than repackaging existing schemas.
The document discusses a student project to educate young Singaporeans about the importance of Total Defence. The project aims to explore why Total Defence is commemorated on the same date that Britain fell to Japanese forces. It also examines the different aspects of Total Defence and how it relates to Singapore's history. The students conducted research online, in libraries, and by visiting historical sites and asking guides. They learned about the importance of Total Defence for Singapore and why it was established. Creating the documentary helped the students better understand and share their knowledge on this topic.
The document discusses public speaking and its importance for careers and civic engagement. It explains that public speaking involves organizing thoughts logically and tailoring the message for the audience. While public speaking and casual conversation share similarities, public speaking requires a more formal structure, language, and delivery method. The document also discusses managing anxiety when speaking in public and the importance of preparation, visualization, and focusing on organized thinking.
Carolyn Caizzi and Barbara Rockenbach presentation for the "Collaborative Ventures, Collaborative Gains" session at the VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd Joint Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Jennifer Friedman presentation at the "How do we shelve it? The place for Vendor-provided electronic titles in art and architecture collections" session at the VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd Joint Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Steven Kowalik, Hunter College / CUNY
New York City presentation from VRA 28 Atlanta.
"Transition to Learning Spaces: Redefining Our Space for the Digital World" for the "After the Transition: Planning for Collections Storage & Workspace Changes in the Digital Environment" session.
Karen Kessel presentation for "More Than Meets the Eye? Retrieving Art Images by Subject" session at VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd joint conference in Minneapolis, MN.
The document discusses metadata schemas and workflows for cataloging digital assets. It provides examples of metadata schemas including Dublin Core and Photoshop XMP schemas. It also describes different organizations' processes for collecting metadata from faculty and students and integrating it into databases using tools like Photoshop and custom metadata panels. Custom metadata schemas are suggested to better fit specific needs rather than repackaging existing schemas.
VRA 2023 Collections Management in Fashion and Media session. Presenter: Wen Nie Ng
The goal of the paper is to enhance the metadata standard of fashion collections by expanding the controlled vocabulary and metadata elements for Costume Core, a metadata schema designed specifically for fashion artifacts. Various techniques are employed to achieve this goal, including identifying new descriptors using word embedding similarity measurements and adding new descriptive terms for precise artifact descriptions to use when re-cataloging a university fashion collection in Costume Core. The paper also provides a sneak peek of the Model Output Confirmative Helper Application, which simplifies the vocabulary review process. Additionally, a survey was conducted to collect insights into how other fashion professionals use metadata when describing dress artifacts. The survey results reveal 1) commonly used metadata standards in the historic fashion domain; 2) sample metadata respondents use; and 3) partial potential metadata that can be appended to Costume Core, which is relevant to Virginia Tech's Oris Glisson Historic Costume and Textile Collection. The expanded Costume Core resulting from the project offers a more comprehensive way of describing fashion collection holdings/artifacts. It has the potential to be adopted by the fashion collections to produce metadata that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
VRA 2023 Adventures in Critical Cataloging session. Presenters: Sara Schumacher and Millicent Fullmer
This paper will cover the results of a research study looking at visual resources professionals' perceptions of the visual canon at their institutions and their actions confronting biases in their visual collections. This research is innovative because the "visual canon" as a concept is often evoked but rarely defined, and there has not been research into perceptions and practices that span different types of cultural heritage institutions. The researchers seek to focus on the role of the visual resources professional as a potential change-maker in confronting bias and transforming the “visual canon.” In our presentation, we will discuss the analysis of our survey and interviews around three key research questions: What barriers do visual resources professionals perceive in remedying the biases in the visual canon? What authorities, past and present, do they identify in shaping the visual canon? How do they approach teaching users to identify and critically confront these issues? We will highlight trends as well as unique concerns and solutions from our research participants and engage our audience with how these issues impact their own collections, policies, and instruction.
VRA 2023 Beyond the Classroom: Developing Image Databases for Research session. Presenter: John J. Taormina
The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database project collects historic images of the medieval monuments of South Italy, from the so-called Kingdom of Sicily dating from c. 950 to c. 1430, during the Norman, Hohenstaufen, Angevin, and early Aragonese periods. The project was begun in 2011, as part of a 3-year Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, under project investigators Caroline Bruzelius, Duke University, and William Tronzo, University of California, San Diego.
The site features over 8,000 historical images in a range of media, including drawings, paintings, engravings, photographs, and plans and elevations culled from museums, archives, and libraries in Europe and America, often from the Grand Tour, as well as from available publications. The value of the database lies in making accessible to scholars the visual documentation of changes to historical sites because the medieval monuments of South Italy have been damaged, changed, and restored on many occasions, with tombs and liturgical furnishings often destroyed, dismantled, or removed. In fact, many of the 600 monuments no longer exist, often bombed during World War II or destroyed in earthquakes, or obscured by modern buildings and urban sprawl.
VRA 2023 Archives Tools and Techniques session. Presenters: Maureen Burns and Lavinia Ciuffa
The Ernest Nash collection documents ancient Roman architecture in pre- and post-World War II Italy. What made Nash's work significant, beyond capturing the present state of the ancient Roman monuments at a volatile historical moment, was the primacy of the topographical photography and the systematic order he brought to this subject. The American Academy's Photographic Archive contributed Nash's images to an open access, interactive website called the "Urban Legacy of Ancient Rome." It reveals the city in stunning detail and uses geo-referencing to provide the viewer with a better understanding of the overall contextual and spatial logic. These Nash images and metadata are also IIIF compatible. As the Academy continues to digitize and describe the full collection of about 30,000 images, thanks to the generous support of the Kress Foundation, a new partnership has developed with Archivision and vrcHost. Current high quality digital photographs of the same ancient Roman monuments are being added to compare with the historical images documenting architectural changes--whether conserved, restored, altered, reconstructed, re-sited or destroyed. This presentation will provide a progress report about what it takes to move new digital photography into IIIF and the various tools available for close examination and presentation. Finding ways to provide ready access and juxtapose historic and contemporary photography online, builds upon the legacy of Nash's quality curation and scholarship to create 21st century, accessible, online educational resources of great interest and utility to scholars, students, and a wide audience of ancient Roman enthusiasts.
VRA 2023 Exploring 3D Technologies in the Classroom session. Presenter: Amy McKenna
Amy McKenna (Williams College) discusses her project that uses Photoshop and cardboard 3D glasses to recreate the 19th-century spectacle of a historic glass stereo collection.
VRA 2023 Keynote. Presenter: Melissa Gohlke
A historical record that focuses on white, heteronormative society and events obscures many facets of San Antonio history. Peel back the veneer of normalcy and one can find rich, diverse, and unexpected strands of the city’s past. From female impersonators of the early 1900s to queer life in derelict spaces during the 1960s and finally, gay and lesbian bar culture of the1970s and beyond, the hidden threads of San Antonio’s history reveal themselves. In this presentation, LGBTQ Historian Melissa Gohlke explores these hidden histories and stitches together an alternative interpretation of the city’s historical narrative by examining a wealth of primary sources found in archives and personal collections.
About the speaker:
Melissa Gohlke is an urban historian who specializes in San Antonio LGBTQ+ history. For over a decade, Gohlke has been researching queer history in San Antonio and South Texas and sharing her passion for this history through extensive outreach activities such as presentations, media interactions, exhibits, and written work. Gohlke is the Assistant Archivist for UTSA Libraries Special Collections.
About the VRA:
The Visual Resources Association is a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments.
VRA 2023 Beyond the Classroom: Developing Image Databases for Research session. Presenter: Mark Pompelia
Material Order is an academic consortium of material sample collections (including wood, metal, glass, ceramic, polymers, plastics, textiles, bio-materials, etc.—any material that might be used in or considered for art, architecture, and design disciplines) founded by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design and now comprising several more institutions in the US. It provides a community-based approach to management and access to material collections utilizing and developing standards and best practices. Material Order created the Materials Profile that serves as a shared cataloging tool on the LYRASIS CollectionSpace platform and can be further developed as the different needs of consortium members are identified. Open Web searching across all collections occurs via a front-end discovery portal built with Wordpress at materialorder.org.
The Material Order project was born from the acknowledgment that resource sharing and collaborative catalogs are the most promising approach to exploration and implementation. It was always the intent, now actualized, for partner institutions with different mission and scope to compel the project to consider and accommodate criteria such as material health ecologies, fabrication possibilities, and overlap into adjacent fields such as engineering and archeology. Thus, Material Order represents not just items on a shelf but a knowledge-base of compositions, uses, forms, and properties. No longer in its infancy, Material Order provides a shared and adaptable framework for managing collections across the consortium and optimal facilitation of materials-based research and exploration for art, architecture, and design applications.
VRA 2023 New Frontiers in Visual Resources session. Presenters: Meghan Rubenstein and Kate Leonard
The Art Department at Colorado College is piloting a Personal Archiving program in select undergraduate studio courses that combines visual and digital literacy instruction with personal reflection and professional development. Meghan Rubenstein, Curator of Visual Resources, and Kate Leonard, Professor of Art, will discuss the drive behind this initiative to develop student competencies within a liberal arts setting. We will share our ongoing iterative process as well as select student activities and learning outcomes that may be adopted to various institutions.
VRA 2022 Teaching Visual Literacy session. Presenter: Molly Schoen
Our everyday lives are more saturated in images and videos than any other time in human history. This fact alone underscores the need to implement visual literacy skills in all stages of education, from pre-K to post-grad. Learning how to read images with critical, analytical eyes is crucial to understanding the world around us as we see it represented in the news, social media, advertisements, etc. New technologies have exasperated this already urgent need for visual literacy education. Synthetic media, deepfakes, APIs, bot farms, and other forms of artificial intelligence have many innovative uses, but bad actors also use them to fan the flames of disinformation. We have seen the grave consequences from this age of disinformation, from undermining elections to attempts to delegitimize science and doctors, undoubtedly raising the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic. What do we need to know about these new forms of altered images made by artificial intelligence? How do we discern between real, human-made content versus fakes made by computers, which are becoming more and more difficult to discern? This paper aims to raise awareness of how new forms of visual media can manipulate and deceive the viewer. Audience participants will learn how to empower themselves and their peers into being more savvy consumers of visual materials by understanding the basics of AI and recognizing the characteristics of faked media.
VRA 2022 Individual Papers Session. Presenter: Malia Van Heukelem
This case study of a large artist archive at a medium sized academic research library will connect the success of the artist serving as his own archivist and the collection's broad research appeal locally, nationally and internationally. Like many artists, there is so much more than his own work represented. There is correspondence, fine art prints, ephemera of other artists and writers hidden in the collection. The foundation of organization is in place; now the focus is on creating online access points through finding aids and image collections. The presentation will explore the use of ArchivesSpace, Omeka, and other software to increase access. It will also demonstrate how a solo archivist can leverage interns, student assistants, and volunteers for collections management projects that benefit both the institutional priorities and desired learning outcomes. This talk will delve into the challenges of 20th century visual resource collections such as copyright and engagement with donors. Featuring a local artist has brought other art and architecture collections to the library, without clear boundaries which has led to questions of sustainability, who and what is collected. There is definitely a need to balance the historical record and yet, there are already more archival collections accessioned than can be responsibly managed by one person. The primary collection does include works by women and artists of color, yet much descriptive work remains to forefront the diversity contained within. As an archivist and librarian at a public university, there are many competing demands for collections management, support of researchers, and instruction plus the added interest for exhibition loans and the desire for other artists and architects to be represented. This artist archive is both interesting and complex.
This document summarizes an art history course titled "Pattern & Representation: Critical Cataloging for a New Perspective on Campus History" taught at Oklahoma State University. The course examines major developments in American art across different media from European contact through the mid-20th century. As part of the course, students are divided into groups to create digital exhibitions cataloging artworks from university newspaper archives between certain years. Students must include contextual information and link their entries to related articles. Their entries and a reflective essay are graded individually based on their work plan. The course introduces the concept of "critical cataloging" to bring social justice perspectives to archival and metadata work.
VRA 2022 session. Organizer/Moderator: Allan T. Kohl. Speakers: Virginia (Macie) Hall, Christina Updike, Marcia Focht, Rebecca Moss, Steven Kowalik, Jenni Rodda
During the past year, the “Great Resignation” (aka. The “Big Quit”) has roiled the world of employment nationwide in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had already caused job losses among our membership. While many institutions and individuals now hope for a “return to normal,” others anticipate that the past two years mark a watershed necessitating further transformational changes in the years ahead. These larger employment trends have come on top of quantum shifts in the visual resources field itself, as traditional tasks give way to new responsibilities, and siloed image collections are replaced by interdisciplinary projects.
For several years, our annual conferences have featured the perspectives of newer professionals in “Stories from the Start.” Looking at the opposite ends of their career arcs, this session brings together the perspectives and experiences of two pre-pandemic retirees, two of our members who made their decisions to retire during the past year, and two currently active professionals whose retirements are pending in the near future. When and why did they make their decisions to retire? What was/is the actual process? Concerns? What comes next after we leave our offices for the last time?
VRA 2022 Digital Art History session. Presenters: Melissa Becher and Samuel Sadow
In 2019, the art history program at American University gave its masters students a new option for the capstone project that is the culmination of the degree: create a digital project on an art historical topic using Omeka S or Wordpress. Initially, only a single student chose to complete a digital capstone over a traditional thesis, but within two years there was near parity between the two options, meaning seven digital capstones for the 2021 cohort. To support these projects, a close partnership quickly developed between the University’s library, the visual resources center, and the archives. This session covers how three campus units coordinate that support for these innovative digital humanities projects, including administration of the platforms, instruction, technical support, preservation, and access to the final projects. The session will also showcase examples of student work to demonstrate the variety and creativity of projects that can be accomplished using these platforms, as well as their contributions to the field of art history. The outcome of this initiative is clear: the best of digital humanities, weaving design and technology with rigorous art historical research, and finished projects that have already resulted in successful job applications in the field.
VRA 2022 Material Objects and Special Collections session. Presenters: Allan T. Kohl and Jackie Spafford
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.
VRA 2022 Digital Art History session. Moderator: Otto Luna
Exploration of visualization tools in the Digital Humanities/Digital Art History realm. Presenter: Catherine Adams
Assessing the use of Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) by Art Historians and Archaeologists. Presenter: Kayla Olson
Supporting Art History Students’ Digital Projects at American University. Presenters: Samuel Sadow and Melissa Becher
VRA 2022 Digital Art History session. Presenter: Kayla Olson
This paper discusses a study (completed in the spring of 2021) which explores how common the use of Qualitative Data Analysis software (QDAS) is among two kinds of object-based researchers: art historians and archaeologists. Surveys were disseminated in a snowball fashion and contained open and closed questions. The questions sought to give participants a platform to describe if, why, and how they use programs like Atlas.ti, NVivo, Dedoose, and MAXQDA throughout their research process. While not QDAS, the image management application Tropy was also included. The author hopes that the anonymized responses will prompt discussion among professionals in academic librarianship and visual resources management about the possible impact of these digital tools on researchers in these disciplines. The question remains on whether researchers in art and material culture disciplines would benefit more from QDAS if participants were aware of: 1) Their existence and 2) Their ability to help organize artifact data and to assist in performing image-based analysis.
VRA 2022 Critical Cataloging Conversations in Teaching, Research, and Practice session. Presenter: Ann M. Graf, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, Simmons University
In the field of information science, we strive to provide access to information through the most efficient means possible. This is often done through the use of controlled vocabularies for description of subjects, and, in the case of art objects, for the identification of styles, processes, materials, and types. My research has examined the sufficiency of controlled vocabularies such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for description of graffiti art processes and products. This research is evolving as the AAT is responding to warrant for a broader set of terms to represent outsider art communities such as the graffiti art community. The methods used to study terminological warrant by examining the language of the graffiti art community are helpful to give voice to artists who work outside the traditional art institution, allowing the way that they talk about their work and how they describe it to become part of the common discourse. It is hoped that this research will inspire others who design and supplement controlled vocabularies for use in the arts to give priority in descriptive practice to those who have been historically underrepresented or made invisible by default use of terminology that does not speak to their experiences.
VRA 2022 Session. Presenter: Douglas Peterson
In 2021, the National Archives of Estonia engaged Digital Transitions’ Service division, Pixel Acuity, to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to analyze part of its historic record. The objective was to use this tool to enhance their collection with descriptive metadata that identified persons of interest in a collection of over 8,000 photographic glass plate negatives, a task that would ordinarily take years of human labor. In this presentation, we discuss our approach to accurately detecting and identifying human subjects in transmissive media, our initial findings using commercially available AI models, and the subsequent refinements made to our workflow to generate the most accurate metadata. In addition to working with commercially available AI models, we developed strategies for validation of AI-generated results without additional human supervision, and explored the benefits of building bespoke, heritage-specific AI models. By combining all of these tools, we developed a highly customized solution that greatly expedited accurate metadata generation with minimal human oversight, operated efficiently on large collections, and supported discovery of novel content within the archive.
VRA 2022 Community Building Session. Presenter: Dacia Metes
Queens Memory is an ongoing community archiving program that engages with our local communities in our two-fold mission to (1) push local history collections out to the public through programming and online resources, and (2) pull new materials into our collections from the diverse communities of Queens, NYC. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to close our buildings, cease all in-person work and programming and shift our work to the virtual world. Our team quickly modified our processing workflow and asset tracking with the high volume of crowd-sourced donations coming through new online submission forms, set up in a rapid response to capture the stories coming from the pandemic’s first epicenter in the U.S. In my proposed conference session, I will discuss how we planned and managed the shift to fully online collection development. I will talk about our virtual outreach efforts to engage with the community and get them to contribute their materials, and how we developed the online tools and processes that allowed us to collect photographs, oral history interviews and other audio/visual materials, while also capturing the necessary metadata and consent forms. New internal communications channels, roles for volunteers, and triage processing for publication resulted from these efforts and are now essential parts of the team’s practices.
The document summarizes a workshop on accessibility guidance for digital cultural heritage collections. The workshop consists of two hours which include presentations on accessibility requirements and workflow strategies, a breakout activity where participants practice creating accessible descriptions for images, and a wrap-up discussion. The presentations cover topics such as common barriers to accessibility, guidelines for making images, video, audio and documents accessible, and best practices for incorporating accessibility into workflows. The breakout activity has participants work in groups to write alt-text and accessibility descriptions for sample images from online collections.
VRA 2023 Collections Management in Fashion and Media session. Presenter: Wen Nie Ng
The goal of the paper is to enhance the metadata standard of fashion collections by expanding the controlled vocabulary and metadata elements for Costume Core, a metadata schema designed specifically for fashion artifacts. Various techniques are employed to achieve this goal, including identifying new descriptors using word embedding similarity measurements and adding new descriptive terms for precise artifact descriptions to use when re-cataloging a university fashion collection in Costume Core. The paper also provides a sneak peek of the Model Output Confirmative Helper Application, which simplifies the vocabulary review process. Additionally, a survey was conducted to collect insights into how other fashion professionals use metadata when describing dress artifacts. The survey results reveal 1) commonly used metadata standards in the historic fashion domain; 2) sample metadata respondents use; and 3) partial potential metadata that can be appended to Costume Core, which is relevant to Virginia Tech's Oris Glisson Historic Costume and Textile Collection. The expanded Costume Core resulting from the project offers a more comprehensive way of describing fashion collection holdings/artifacts. It has the potential to be adopted by the fashion collections to produce metadata that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
VRA 2023 Adventures in Critical Cataloging session. Presenters: Sara Schumacher and Millicent Fullmer
This paper will cover the results of a research study looking at visual resources professionals' perceptions of the visual canon at their institutions and their actions confronting biases in their visual collections. This research is innovative because the "visual canon" as a concept is often evoked but rarely defined, and there has not been research into perceptions and practices that span different types of cultural heritage institutions. The researchers seek to focus on the role of the visual resources professional as a potential change-maker in confronting bias and transforming the “visual canon.” In our presentation, we will discuss the analysis of our survey and interviews around three key research questions: What barriers do visual resources professionals perceive in remedying the biases in the visual canon? What authorities, past and present, do they identify in shaping the visual canon? How do they approach teaching users to identify and critically confront these issues? We will highlight trends as well as unique concerns and solutions from our research participants and engage our audience with how these issues impact their own collections, policies, and instruction.
VRA 2023 Beyond the Classroom: Developing Image Databases for Research session. Presenter: John J. Taormina
The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database project collects historic images of the medieval monuments of South Italy, from the so-called Kingdom of Sicily dating from c. 950 to c. 1430, during the Norman, Hohenstaufen, Angevin, and early Aragonese periods. The project was begun in 2011, as part of a 3-year Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, under project investigators Caroline Bruzelius, Duke University, and William Tronzo, University of California, San Diego.
The site features over 8,000 historical images in a range of media, including drawings, paintings, engravings, photographs, and plans and elevations culled from museums, archives, and libraries in Europe and America, often from the Grand Tour, as well as from available publications. The value of the database lies in making accessible to scholars the visual documentation of changes to historical sites because the medieval monuments of South Italy have been damaged, changed, and restored on many occasions, with tombs and liturgical furnishings often destroyed, dismantled, or removed. In fact, many of the 600 monuments no longer exist, often bombed during World War II or destroyed in earthquakes, or obscured by modern buildings and urban sprawl.
VRA 2023 Archives Tools and Techniques session. Presenters: Maureen Burns and Lavinia Ciuffa
The Ernest Nash collection documents ancient Roman architecture in pre- and post-World War II Italy. What made Nash's work significant, beyond capturing the present state of the ancient Roman monuments at a volatile historical moment, was the primacy of the topographical photography and the systematic order he brought to this subject. The American Academy's Photographic Archive contributed Nash's images to an open access, interactive website called the "Urban Legacy of Ancient Rome." It reveals the city in stunning detail and uses geo-referencing to provide the viewer with a better understanding of the overall contextual and spatial logic. These Nash images and metadata are also IIIF compatible. As the Academy continues to digitize and describe the full collection of about 30,000 images, thanks to the generous support of the Kress Foundation, a new partnership has developed with Archivision and vrcHost. Current high quality digital photographs of the same ancient Roman monuments are being added to compare with the historical images documenting architectural changes--whether conserved, restored, altered, reconstructed, re-sited or destroyed. This presentation will provide a progress report about what it takes to move new digital photography into IIIF and the various tools available for close examination and presentation. Finding ways to provide ready access and juxtapose historic and contemporary photography online, builds upon the legacy of Nash's quality curation and scholarship to create 21st century, accessible, online educational resources of great interest and utility to scholars, students, and a wide audience of ancient Roman enthusiasts.
VRA 2023 Exploring 3D Technologies in the Classroom session. Presenter: Amy McKenna
Amy McKenna (Williams College) discusses her project that uses Photoshop and cardboard 3D glasses to recreate the 19th-century spectacle of a historic glass stereo collection.
VRA 2023 Keynote. Presenter: Melissa Gohlke
A historical record that focuses on white, heteronormative society and events obscures many facets of San Antonio history. Peel back the veneer of normalcy and one can find rich, diverse, and unexpected strands of the city’s past. From female impersonators of the early 1900s to queer life in derelict spaces during the 1960s and finally, gay and lesbian bar culture of the1970s and beyond, the hidden threads of San Antonio’s history reveal themselves. In this presentation, LGBTQ Historian Melissa Gohlke explores these hidden histories and stitches together an alternative interpretation of the city’s historical narrative by examining a wealth of primary sources found in archives and personal collections.
About the speaker:
Melissa Gohlke is an urban historian who specializes in San Antonio LGBTQ+ history. For over a decade, Gohlke has been researching queer history in San Antonio and South Texas and sharing her passion for this history through extensive outreach activities such as presentations, media interactions, exhibits, and written work. Gohlke is the Assistant Archivist for UTSA Libraries Special Collections.
About the VRA:
The Visual Resources Association is a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments.
VRA 2023 Beyond the Classroom: Developing Image Databases for Research session. Presenter: Mark Pompelia
Material Order is an academic consortium of material sample collections (including wood, metal, glass, ceramic, polymers, plastics, textiles, bio-materials, etc.—any material that might be used in or considered for art, architecture, and design disciplines) founded by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design and now comprising several more institutions in the US. It provides a community-based approach to management and access to material collections utilizing and developing standards and best practices. Material Order created the Materials Profile that serves as a shared cataloging tool on the LYRASIS CollectionSpace platform and can be further developed as the different needs of consortium members are identified. Open Web searching across all collections occurs via a front-end discovery portal built with Wordpress at materialorder.org.
The Material Order project was born from the acknowledgment that resource sharing and collaborative catalogs are the most promising approach to exploration and implementation. It was always the intent, now actualized, for partner institutions with different mission and scope to compel the project to consider and accommodate criteria such as material health ecologies, fabrication possibilities, and overlap into adjacent fields such as engineering and archeology. Thus, Material Order represents not just items on a shelf but a knowledge-base of compositions, uses, forms, and properties. No longer in its infancy, Material Order provides a shared and adaptable framework for managing collections across the consortium and optimal facilitation of materials-based research and exploration for art, architecture, and design applications.
VRA 2023 New Frontiers in Visual Resources session. Presenters: Meghan Rubenstein and Kate Leonard
The Art Department at Colorado College is piloting a Personal Archiving program in select undergraduate studio courses that combines visual and digital literacy instruction with personal reflection and professional development. Meghan Rubenstein, Curator of Visual Resources, and Kate Leonard, Professor of Art, will discuss the drive behind this initiative to develop student competencies within a liberal arts setting. We will share our ongoing iterative process as well as select student activities and learning outcomes that may be adopted to various institutions.
VRA 2022 Teaching Visual Literacy session. Presenter: Molly Schoen
Our everyday lives are more saturated in images and videos than any other time in human history. This fact alone underscores the need to implement visual literacy skills in all stages of education, from pre-K to post-grad. Learning how to read images with critical, analytical eyes is crucial to understanding the world around us as we see it represented in the news, social media, advertisements, etc. New technologies have exasperated this already urgent need for visual literacy education. Synthetic media, deepfakes, APIs, bot farms, and other forms of artificial intelligence have many innovative uses, but bad actors also use them to fan the flames of disinformation. We have seen the grave consequences from this age of disinformation, from undermining elections to attempts to delegitimize science and doctors, undoubtedly raising the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic. What do we need to know about these new forms of altered images made by artificial intelligence? How do we discern between real, human-made content versus fakes made by computers, which are becoming more and more difficult to discern? This paper aims to raise awareness of how new forms of visual media can manipulate and deceive the viewer. Audience participants will learn how to empower themselves and their peers into being more savvy consumers of visual materials by understanding the basics of AI and recognizing the characteristics of faked media.
VRA 2022 Individual Papers Session. Presenter: Malia Van Heukelem
This case study of a large artist archive at a medium sized academic research library will connect the success of the artist serving as his own archivist and the collection's broad research appeal locally, nationally and internationally. Like many artists, there is so much more than his own work represented. There is correspondence, fine art prints, ephemera of other artists and writers hidden in the collection. The foundation of organization is in place; now the focus is on creating online access points through finding aids and image collections. The presentation will explore the use of ArchivesSpace, Omeka, and other software to increase access. It will also demonstrate how a solo archivist can leverage interns, student assistants, and volunteers for collections management projects that benefit both the institutional priorities and desired learning outcomes. This talk will delve into the challenges of 20th century visual resource collections such as copyright and engagement with donors. Featuring a local artist has brought other art and architecture collections to the library, without clear boundaries which has led to questions of sustainability, who and what is collected. There is definitely a need to balance the historical record and yet, there are already more archival collections accessioned than can be responsibly managed by one person. The primary collection does include works by women and artists of color, yet much descriptive work remains to forefront the diversity contained within. As an archivist and librarian at a public university, there are many competing demands for collections management, support of researchers, and instruction plus the added interest for exhibition loans and the desire for other artists and architects to be represented. This artist archive is both interesting and complex.
This document summarizes an art history course titled "Pattern & Representation: Critical Cataloging for a New Perspective on Campus History" taught at Oklahoma State University. The course examines major developments in American art across different media from European contact through the mid-20th century. As part of the course, students are divided into groups to create digital exhibitions cataloging artworks from university newspaper archives between certain years. Students must include contextual information and link their entries to related articles. Their entries and a reflective essay are graded individually based on their work plan. The course introduces the concept of "critical cataloging" to bring social justice perspectives to archival and metadata work.
VRA 2022 session. Organizer/Moderator: Allan T. Kohl. Speakers: Virginia (Macie) Hall, Christina Updike, Marcia Focht, Rebecca Moss, Steven Kowalik, Jenni Rodda
During the past year, the “Great Resignation” (aka. The “Big Quit”) has roiled the world of employment nationwide in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had already caused job losses among our membership. While many institutions and individuals now hope for a “return to normal,” others anticipate that the past two years mark a watershed necessitating further transformational changes in the years ahead. These larger employment trends have come on top of quantum shifts in the visual resources field itself, as traditional tasks give way to new responsibilities, and siloed image collections are replaced by interdisciplinary projects.
For several years, our annual conferences have featured the perspectives of newer professionals in “Stories from the Start.” Looking at the opposite ends of their career arcs, this session brings together the perspectives and experiences of two pre-pandemic retirees, two of our members who made their decisions to retire during the past year, and two currently active professionals whose retirements are pending in the near future. When and why did they make their decisions to retire? What was/is the actual process? Concerns? What comes next after we leave our offices for the last time?
VRA 2022 Digital Art History session. Presenters: Melissa Becher and Samuel Sadow
In 2019, the art history program at American University gave its masters students a new option for the capstone project that is the culmination of the degree: create a digital project on an art historical topic using Omeka S or Wordpress. Initially, only a single student chose to complete a digital capstone over a traditional thesis, but within two years there was near parity between the two options, meaning seven digital capstones for the 2021 cohort. To support these projects, a close partnership quickly developed between the University’s library, the visual resources center, and the archives. This session covers how three campus units coordinate that support for these innovative digital humanities projects, including administration of the platforms, instruction, technical support, preservation, and access to the final projects. The session will also showcase examples of student work to demonstrate the variety and creativity of projects that can be accomplished using these platforms, as well as their contributions to the field of art history. The outcome of this initiative is clear: the best of digital humanities, weaving design and technology with rigorous art historical research, and finished projects that have already resulted in successful job applications in the field.
VRA 2022 Material Objects and Special Collections session. Presenters: Allan T. Kohl and Jackie Spafford
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.
VRA 2022 Digital Art History session. Moderator: Otto Luna
Exploration of visualization tools in the Digital Humanities/Digital Art History realm. Presenter: Catherine Adams
Assessing the use of Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) by Art Historians and Archaeologists. Presenter: Kayla Olson
Supporting Art History Students’ Digital Projects at American University. Presenters: Samuel Sadow and Melissa Becher
VRA 2022 Digital Art History session. Presenter: Kayla Olson
This paper discusses a study (completed in the spring of 2021) which explores how common the use of Qualitative Data Analysis software (QDAS) is among two kinds of object-based researchers: art historians and archaeologists. Surveys were disseminated in a snowball fashion and contained open and closed questions. The questions sought to give participants a platform to describe if, why, and how they use programs like Atlas.ti, NVivo, Dedoose, and MAXQDA throughout their research process. While not QDAS, the image management application Tropy was also included. The author hopes that the anonymized responses will prompt discussion among professionals in academic librarianship and visual resources management about the possible impact of these digital tools on researchers in these disciplines. The question remains on whether researchers in art and material culture disciplines would benefit more from QDAS if participants were aware of: 1) Their existence and 2) Their ability to help organize artifact data and to assist in performing image-based analysis.
VRA 2022 Critical Cataloging Conversations in Teaching, Research, and Practice session. Presenter: Ann M. Graf, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, Simmons University
In the field of information science, we strive to provide access to information through the most efficient means possible. This is often done through the use of controlled vocabularies for description of subjects, and, in the case of art objects, for the identification of styles, processes, materials, and types. My research has examined the sufficiency of controlled vocabularies such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for description of graffiti art processes and products. This research is evolving as the AAT is responding to warrant for a broader set of terms to represent outsider art communities such as the graffiti art community. The methods used to study terminological warrant by examining the language of the graffiti art community are helpful to give voice to artists who work outside the traditional art institution, allowing the way that they talk about their work and how they describe it to become part of the common discourse. It is hoped that this research will inspire others who design and supplement controlled vocabularies for use in the arts to give priority in descriptive practice to those who have been historically underrepresented or made invisible by default use of terminology that does not speak to their experiences.
VRA 2022 Session. Presenter: Douglas Peterson
In 2021, the National Archives of Estonia engaged Digital Transitions’ Service division, Pixel Acuity, to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to analyze part of its historic record. The objective was to use this tool to enhance their collection with descriptive metadata that identified persons of interest in a collection of over 8,000 photographic glass plate negatives, a task that would ordinarily take years of human labor. In this presentation, we discuss our approach to accurately detecting and identifying human subjects in transmissive media, our initial findings using commercially available AI models, and the subsequent refinements made to our workflow to generate the most accurate metadata. In addition to working with commercially available AI models, we developed strategies for validation of AI-generated results without additional human supervision, and explored the benefits of building bespoke, heritage-specific AI models. By combining all of these tools, we developed a highly customized solution that greatly expedited accurate metadata generation with minimal human oversight, operated efficiently on large collections, and supported discovery of novel content within the archive.
VRA 2022 Community Building Session. Presenter: Dacia Metes
Queens Memory is an ongoing community archiving program that engages with our local communities in our two-fold mission to (1) push local history collections out to the public through programming and online resources, and (2) pull new materials into our collections from the diverse communities of Queens, NYC. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to close our buildings, cease all in-person work and programming and shift our work to the virtual world. Our team quickly modified our processing workflow and asset tracking with the high volume of crowd-sourced donations coming through new online submission forms, set up in a rapid response to capture the stories coming from the pandemic’s first epicenter in the U.S. In my proposed conference session, I will discuss how we planned and managed the shift to fully online collection development. I will talk about our virtual outreach efforts to engage with the community and get them to contribute their materials, and how we developed the online tools and processes that allowed us to collect photographs, oral history interviews and other audio/visual materials, while also capturing the necessary metadata and consent forms. New internal communications channels, roles for volunteers, and triage processing for publication resulted from these efforts and are now essential parts of the team’s practices.
The document summarizes a workshop on accessibility guidance for digital cultural heritage collections. The workshop consists of two hours which include presentations on accessibility requirements and workflow strategies, a breakout activity where participants practice creating accessible descriptions for images, and a wrap-up discussion. The presentations cover topics such as common barriers to accessibility, guidelines for making images, video, audio and documents accessible, and best practices for incorporating accessibility into workflows. The breakout activity has participants work in groups to write alt-text and accessibility descriptions for sample images from online collections.
it describes the bony anatomy including the femoral head , acetabulum, labrum . also discusses the capsule , ligaments . muscle that act on the hip joint and the range of motion are outlined. factors affecting hip joint stability and weight transmission through the joint are summarized.
Assessment and Planning in Educational technology.pptxKavitha Krishnan
In an education system, it is understood that assessment is only for the students, but on the other hand, the Assessment of teachers is also an important aspect of the education system that ensures teachers are providing high-quality instruction to students. The assessment process can be used to provide feedback and support for professional development, to inform decisions about teacher retention or promotion, or to evaluate teacher effectiveness for accountability purposes.
How to Add Chatter in the odoo 17 ERP ModuleCeline George
In Odoo, the chatter is like a chat tool that helps you work together on records. You can leave notes and track things, making it easier to talk with your team and partners. Inside chatter, all communication history, activity, and changes will be displayed.
A workshop hosted by the South African Journal of Science aimed at postgraduate students and early career researchers with little or no experience in writing and publishing journal articles.
A review of the growth of the Israel Genealogy Research Association Database Collection for the last 12 months. Our collection is now passed the 3 million mark and still growing. See which archives have contributed the most. See the different types of records we have, and which years have had records added. You can also see what we have for the future.
Strategies for Effective Upskilling is a presentation by Chinwendu Peace in a Your Skill Boost Masterclass organisation by the Excellence Foundation for South Sudan on 08th and 09th June 2024 from 1 PM to 3 PM on each day.
Macroeconomics- Movie Location
This will be used as part of your Personal Professional Portfolio once graded.
Objective:
Prepare a presentation or a paper using research, basic comparative analysis, data organization and application of economic information. You will make an informed assessment of an economic climate outside of the United States to accomplish an entertainment industry objective.
How to Build a Module in Odoo 17 Using the Scaffold MethodCeline George
Odoo provides an option for creating a module by using a single line command. By using this command the user can make a whole structure of a module. It is very easy for a beginner to make a module. There is no need to make each file manually. This slide will show how to create a module using the scaffold method.
Physiology and chemistry of skin and pigmentation, hairs, scalp, lips and nail, Cleansing cream, Lotions, Face powders, Face packs, Lipsticks, Bath products, soaps and baby product,
Preparation and standardization of the following : Tonic, Bleaches, Dentifrices and Mouth washes & Tooth Pastes, Cosmetics for Nails.
Azure Interview Questions and Answers PDF By ScholarHat
Library Instruction in No Time!
1. Library Instruction in NO TIME! Presented by Amy Trendler Case Studies IV, VRA + ARLIS/NA Conference 2011, Minneapolis, MN
2. Limited time in the classroom? That’sO.K.! Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
3. can’t You cover EVERYTHING… Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
4. …but you can FOCUS on a few key goals. Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
5. Dazzle them with the library’s resources. Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
6. Teach them something… Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
7. but, make it FUN! Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
8. Provide toolsto help them navigate. Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
9. Encourage them to come to the library. Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
10. FOCUS Dazzle them. Teach them something. FUN! Make it Provide tools. Encourage them to come to the library. Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler
11. The worksheet from the breakout session. Amy Trendler Architecture Librarian Ball State University aetrendler@bsu.edu
12. The End. Case Studies IV, “Library Instruction in No Time,” presented by Amy Trendler Image credits: Microsoft Clip Art
Editor's Notes
Librarians and visual resources curators don’t always get a lot of time in the classroom, but every time we talk to a class it is an opportunity.I will be using examples from two classes I visit regularly: the first year studio in the College of Architecture and Planning’s common first year program (25 min. with 100 students in lecture hall and 20 min. with sections of 15 students for a library tour) and the thesis research classes (30-50 min. in classroom with 10-20 students).
It is easy to make the mistake of trying to cover everything about the library in a short class visit, but keep in mind that students usually won’t retain much of this information even if there is an assignment related to your session.For the first year class visit I initially covered a lot of ground, but there aren’t many research assignments during this year and my approach wasn’t working very well. I’ve pared back what I cover and refocused on fewer goals for these instruction sessions.
For the first year class, my goal is simply to let them know that the library has lots of resources related to their assignments, interests, and field. To me this is important because new students have little to no experience with a specialized library and often don’t know what they’ll find in the library or even what is being published in their field.For the thesis classes, my goal is to let them know that the library has many resources and services related to their thesis topics and that they can talk to me or email me with questions about their research.
Regardless of the other goals of a session, I think it is always important for us to demonstrate how relevant the library resources or visual resources collection are to students’ classes/assignments/fields. Show them why they should be searching the online catalog or databases rather than getting too caught up in showing them how to find items.Examples: for the first year class I show a timed PPT “video” of new book covers, periodical covers, images from the collection, and archival materials; for the thesis classes I have begun devoting more time to passing around examples of journals from their discipline and new books.
It’s o.k. to try and teach them something such as finding an article, using the LibGuide or library website, or using other library resources, but I don’t make this the ultimate goal of the session. Examples: for the first year class, I will briefly demonstrate finding books, articles, and images; for the grad classes I briefly demonstrate advanced feature of finding books, articles, etc. as well as using services like interlibrary loan.
The ultimate goal is to give students a positive idea about what the library has to offer them and motivate them to make use of library resources. We should keep in mind that at some point we need to take a step back and let students do what they can with our online catalogs and databases; showing them step-by-step and in great detail how to use these resources may not be the best use of limited time in the classroom.
Create easy to understand tools for students to use when they do pursue library research. These may be paper handouts, LibGuides, web sites, or a combination. Examples: I have a LibGuide specifically for students in the first year program; for the thesis research classes I created a “thesis research checklist” paper handout.
The point of all of these efforts: get students in the library or visual resources collection (or to your web site) and using the resources and collections.Example: in the first year class I conduct two short exercises during their library tour by passing out copies of online catalog records for books and article citations. Students must find the book and then the article, which have all been carefully chosen so that they are interesting and current. Both exercises give students a small success in finding items, a chance to see that the librarian is approachable as I walk around helping them, and time to flip through an interesting book or article.
Any class visit, even 15 minutes, is an opportunity to promote the library or visual resources collection. When designing a short instruction session consider focusing on broader goals and giving students a positive impression of the library or visual resources collection.