VRA 2012, Emerging New Roles, “The Oxford Experience”
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Presented by Victoria Brown at the Annual Conference of the Visual Resources Association, April 18th - April 21st, 2012, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Session: Emerging new roles for VR professionals: research into and beyond the arts At a time of international financial instability, with positions constantly under threat, analogue collections facing forced closure and space at a premium, this session will hear from VR professionals who are reinventing themselves and evolving roles in changing landscapes, pushing into new disciplines and spaces. Each speaker will discuss the new roles they have taken on, either by accident or design and how their experiences are shaping their view of the VR profession in “the tens”. In many cases this has meant working across disciplines; making their professional presence felt in the classroom and the boardroom; developing new skills but in all cases, broadening their horizons through collaboration. Speakers will discuss supporting courses beyond traditional visual arts, design and art history; collaborating with libraries, IT and faculty in course development and delivery; working with artists and archivists to preserve and expose their work, collections and archives; building repositories; involvement in project funding applications; working in arts research and coordinating non-traditional research outputs. ORGANIZER: Stephanie Beene, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR MODERATOR: Victoria Brown, University of Oxford PRESENTERS: 1: Stephanie Beene, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR 2: Victoria Brown, University of Oxford, UK 3: Jodie Double, University of Leeds, UK 4: Catherine Worrall, University College Falmouth, UK
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VRA 2012, Emerging New Roles, “The Oxford Experience”
- 1. Emerging new roles for VR professionals: research into and beyond the arts “The Oxford Experience” Vicky Brown, Visual Resources Curator Visual Resources Centre, History of Art Department April 18, 2012
- 2. Why new roles? “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” Albert Einstein
- 3. Adapting existing roles Training, advice and support in the use of digital images and associated technologies Building local collections & developing a platform to support teaching and learning Managing visual and material culture archives & working with groups: learning new skills
- 4. A bit of background
- 5. Training: new places, new spaces Subscription databases
- 6. Training: new places, new spaces Image sourcing more generally
- 7. Training: new places, new spaces Image creation, manipulation & management
- 8. Hosting local content Building collections outside the norm Building audio materials to support teaching Building text resources to support teaching
- 9. Supporting teaching and learning: WebLearn Building a departmental presence in New WebLearn
- 10. Supporting teaching and learning: WebLearn An exemplar for the Humanities Division
- 11. Supporting teaching and learning: WebLearn Using WebLearn to create a public face for the VRC
- 12. Managing Visual & Material Culture Archives History of Art archival collections William Cohn Collection Cohn and Jewish émigrés in Oxford
- 13. Working and collaborating in groups Groups in Oxford Groups in the UK Groups outside the UK
- 14. To summarise… Change & adapt New spaces, new skills Beyond the arts
- 15. Sources and references ARTstor: www.artstor.org Bridgeman Education: www.bridgemaneducation.com Treasures of the Bodleian website: http://treasures.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/discover-treasures OUCS ITLP course: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TIMY Oxford University WebLearn: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal WebLearn Guidance site: Showcase: History of Art Case Study: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/info/cases/Historyof%20Art.pdf Oxford University Humanities Division: http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/ History of Art Visual Resources Centre: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/humdiv/histfac/history_of/hoa_visual Archaeology Archives Oxford blog (Jacobstahl): http://archaeologyarchivesoxford.wordpress.com/paul-jacobsthal/ Digital Humanities Oxford: http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/ ACADI (Association of Curators of Art and Design Images): http://acadi.wordpress.com/ Stock.xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/ Flickr Commons: http://www.flickr.com/commons
- 16. Picture credits Giving a Hand Scanning Quick © Johnny Negatives, © Change Nyberg, Julian Artist Board stock.xchng Spencer, Game © stock.xchng Bridgeman Art Library Sculpture of a pig, Students walking Screens Row © Villa Cimbrone, beneath Bridge Alx Sanchez, Ravello (Salerno), of Sighs, Oxford stock.xchng Oppenheimer © PA Photocall Collection © HoA Dept Daniel Buren, Department of Photo-Souvenir, mp3 players, © the History of From three yasin öztürk, Art plaque, windows, 2006, stock.xchng photo © Vicky photo Stephen Brown White, © MAO & the Artist Student in Open and Braun Balliol College Read, © Sanja photographs, Library, © PA Gjenero, photo © Vicky Photocall stock.xchng Brown Linked Hands Planetary Selected © Julia Nebulas, images from Freeman- Smithsonian the Cohn Woolpert, Institution, Flickr Collection, HoA stock.xchng Commons Dept, VRC
Editor's Notes
- -outreach to individual departments and subject-specific sessions for a more tailor-made experience and include other types of image resource – either hands-on or demonstration only - most unusual is the session at the Radcliffe Science Library – attended by academic staff, students and librarians from the social sciences, life sciences and the history of science.
- Efforts were originally driven by need to prove that not just Art Historians rely on images for teaching and research and that these are university-wide resources, but has also led to invitations to other initiatives, including student information fairs run by the libraries; graduate training sessions and to help put togethera workshop on digital imaging – again, offered to a university-wide audience.So I am now making new connections, in new places and teaching in new spaces, which in turn is influencing and shaping my role. Also a lot of time taken up in answering email image-related queries. But it’s not always confined to Oxford - have worked with colleagues from the University of Cambridge who came to hear about our efforts to market image subscription resources to a University-wide audience. Also spoke about visual resources at an ARLIS UK & Ireland Students and Trainees event.
- Delivering resources via ‘New WebLearn’ – HoA as early adopters Plus we recorded our efforts as a Case Study shared through the main WebLearnsite; HoA Administrator & Visual Resources Curator won awards (one of them a University Teaching Award) and presented to and regularly attend WebLearnUser Group sessions.
- Sites have become well known within Humanities Division – presentationat Humanities Teaching Forum – howWebLearnas a technology tool is enhancing teaching and learning within and beyond the department.
- Also developed site for Visual Resources Centre - completely public and accessible to a potentially global audience, whilst also serving the needs of our staff and students in Oxford. So a new role out of departmental endeavour, but thus now more visible within the broader divisional context
- History of Art departmental collections include archival material, some of which we know about but also some with little or no provenance Earlier initiative to investigate the existence and status of ‘hidden archives’ around the University – materials rarely catalogued or recorded in any of the library or museum catalogues &often in varying states of deterioration &not digitised. More recently - internal funding to record these findings, but also to seek further support to stabilise and publicise these collections; including writing of two case studies, which will hopefully include one of our collections – maybe William Cohn image archiveWorking with two archivists in the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford (who have recently been working on their own archive of Jewish émigré Paul Jacobstahl) and one of our current students, we are beginning to build a profile of the man behind our collection.
- As well as visual and material archives group in Oxford - opportunities to join with others working in similar, related areas outside of History of Art, e.g. Digital Media User Groupand Digital Humanities @ Oxford - also committee work & helping to organise Centre for Visual Studies’ annual interdisciplinary workshop – all extend role across the University, broadening horizons and skills set.Outside of Oxford - ARLIS UK & Ireland; ACADI – the Association of Curators of Art & Design Images; VRA and also CHArt– the Computers and the History of Art group. These associations have led to unexpected outcomes, e.g.carrying out a joint research project (findingssoon to be published in the Art Libraries Journal); lobbying the UK government to extend copyright exceptions to include the use of images in education; andpresenting to peers at an international conference
- To conclude – all have to adapt and take on new roles, like teaching, building new local content and learning to preserve what’s left of our analogue collections.There is scope within these roles to reach out further, learn new skills from others and so “broaden our horizons”There is a lot of really interesting work going on, both within our home institutions – in other disciplines too - but also further afield and it’s up to us to engage with that.