Heather is the Director of the Library and Research Center at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. This will be her first year presenting at the conference. She will be a New Voices in the Profession panelist, and will be session moderator for The Changing Landscape for Museum Libraries and Librarians.

Please join me in congratulating Heather Slania.

Sally Stokes
Chair
Caroline Backlund Professional Development Award Committee
ARLIS DC-MD-VA

I am writing on behalf of the ARLIS/NA International Relations committee, which is in the process of organizing a study trip for librarians from Germany to visit New York and New Haven after the ARLIS/NA conference in Toronto (April 14-21, 2012). This reciprocates the study trip organized and partially sponsored by German librarians in their country for US librarians in 2009. Five members of the group will continue onto Washington, DC to visit additional libraries from April 23-25, 2012. Kristen Regina and I are the local contacts for the DC part of the trip.

Based on the German librarians’ requests, we have drafted an itinerary that will include site visits to libraries at the following institutions:

· National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
· National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
· American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
· The National Gallery of Art
· Library of Congress
· Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

While the schedule is not yet finalized, we wanted to let ARLIS/DC-MD-VA chapter members know that the trip is being planned. We also wanted to ask for some help with hosting our colleagues from Germany. So, we thought we would pose a few questions:

1. Would anyone be willing to host any of the guests for a homestay? Depending on their travel plans, the librarians will likely arrive in DC on Sunday, April 22nd and depart Thursday, April 26th, for a total stay of 4 nights.

2. Alternatively, does anyone have any suggestions for a hotel or bed and breakfast with affordable rates, which we can recommend to our visitors?

3. Would the chapter be interested in hosting an event for the German librarians, such as a potluck “farewell” party the last night of their stay (April 25th)?

4. Finally, does anyone have any suggestions for cultural or other events in the evenings during the trip that we might recommend?

We would really appreciate any suggestions from the membership. We are looking forward to showing our colleagues from Germany how rich and diverse the art libraries community is here in DC and we can’t do it without your help. If you are able to host one of the visitors or have any ideas about hotels or events, please feel free to get in touch with either Kristen or I directly (kregina@hillwoodmuseum.org and WhiteS@doaks.org). We will keep you all posted on the progress of the planning as the trip takes shape.

Many thanks,

Shalimar and Kristen
ARLIS/NA International Relations Committee

Deadline Feb. 3, 2012

ARLIS/DC-MD-VA will present a professional development award of $500.00 to a chapter member to attend the 40^th Annual ARLIS/NA Conference to be held this year in Toronto, March 29–April 2, 2012.  This award is intended to help members become more involved in ARLIS/NA at the national level.

For more information on eligibility and application process visit: http://arlisdmv.org/membership/awards/

J. Laurent and Company, General interior view of the new bullring, Madrid, c. 1874, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library

The National Gallery of Art Library’s continuing exhibition program displays selections from its rich rare book collection in two separate venues, one in a permanent gallery on the ground floor of the Gallery’s West Building, the other in the Library atrium on the ground floor of the East Building. A few of these exhibitions each year draw from the more than 13 million images representing the entire history of Western art preserved in the Library’s Department of Image Collections.

From November 7 to December 30, 2011, the department presented The Solemnity of Shadows: Juan Laurent’s Vision of Spain in the atrium of the Study Center. On view were 23 rare large-format albumen photographs, a collodion glass negative, and three albums of Spanish art and architecture by Juan Laurent (1816–1886), a preeminent figure in the history of Spanish photography. Laurent began his career as a portrait photographer in Madrid in 1856, but soon grew and expanded his business until it became the most recognizable topographical photography company in Spain. Large format photographs of Spain’s public works, architecture, cities, popular types in their natural settings, art collections, and contemporary art expositions were his specialties, which he sold in his shops in Madrid and Paris singly or compiled into albums according to customer preference. The Laurent company’s output was immense, and its commercial reach was truly international in scope. Laurent’s was the first commercial firm to photograph the art collections of the Prado Museum, the Royal Armory, and the Academy of San Fernando, earning him a place of honor with other distinguished European photography houses like Alinari in Italy, and Adolphe Braun in France.

J. Laurent and Company, Interior of the gallery and west pavilion of the Court of Lions, Alhambra, Granada, 1871, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, René Huyghe Archive, National Gallery of Art Library

The idea behind the exhibition was to give a taste of the encyclopedic range of Laurent’s production with images representing the north and south of Spain during early and modern periods. Of special interest were images that might have appealed to the romantic and picturesque notions of Spain held by European travelers who would often buy Laurent photographs in Paris, Brussels, or London in advance of their planned trips to the Peninsula. Thus, Laurent’s view of Toledo, with its thirteenth-century bridge and sixteenth-century Alcázar on its arid citadel height, his shot of a Plateresque monument in Salamanca, and his view of a Hispano-Flemish monastery in Valladolid all evoke the north of Spain, epic deeds, and a mysterious historical past. Representing the south with its exotic Arabic cities were photographs of Seville, Córdoba, and Granada. In Granada, the Laurent company spent 30 years refining its photographs of the Alhambra, the last bastion of Moorish rule in the Spain. A coordinating concept for the set of the three Alhambra photographs in the exhibition was the physical decay of the Arab monument during the nineteenth century and the emergence of conservation efforts in the appointment of Rafael Contreras as the Alhambra’s first official restorer in the 1850s. The idea of decay was a specific ingredient of the picturesque aesthetic and of romanticism in general. Countering this historical romantic tendency was a selection of Laurent’s photographs of modern life, exemplified by his views of the freshly-built bull ring and the new urban plaza the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, as well as the new neo-classical railroad station in Barcelona.

J. Laurent and Company, Arab vase of the Alhambra, 1872-1878, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, rare albums collection, National Gallery of Art Library

The exhibition began to take form a few years ago when the department purchased a pair of albums of Spanish architecture by Laurent. The beauty of the photographs in the albums posed the question: How many other Laurent photographs might already be in the department’s collections? A number were known to be among the rare photographs given to the department by the late René Huyghe, the distinguished curator of painting and drawing at the Musée du Louvre and the Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art from 1967 to 1968. A search in the rare section and in other aisles of the photo archives soon uncovered many of the other wonderful photographs of Spanish architecture that comprised this exhibition.

J. Laurent, The Gate of Pardon, Seville, c. 1866, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, rare albums collection, National Gallery of Art Library

In the course of preparation for the exhibition, the department purchased new photographs by Laurent of Seville and Granada, and two new albums with photographs that filled the gap in the collection for Laurent’s documentation of public works projects and his d’après nature series of popular types like gypsies, shepherds, and fishermen posed in their natural settings. The newly acquired albums required extensive last-minute conservation work by the Gallery’s photography conservator Sarah Wagner in order to be included in the exhibition, as did many of the photographs mounted as single sheets.  The exhibition concluded with a selection of Laurent’s photographs of works of art, including striking images of an engraved sixteenth-century helmet and an Arab vase found in the Alhambra.

J. Laurent, Rear or niche of the gallery leading to the Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada, 1871, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library

J. Laurent, Young Girl with a Guitar (d’après nature), before 1871, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, rare albums collection, National Gallery of Art Library

A collodion negative featured in the exhibition shed new light on the influence the Laurent company had in the United States. Many albumen prints with the Laurent trademark found in the main photo archives stacks were as much as five times smaller than the large format photographs in the rare section. Andrea Gibbs, deputy head of the department and image specialist for architecture, explained that the smaller prints were period albumen photographs made in Boston by the Soule Art Publishing Co. in the 1870s and 1880s, and that their corresponding collodion glass negatives were also stored in the department’s negative storage room. These albumen prints of Laurent originals were in effect contemporaneous copies made in the United States for the American market. Searching through the Gramstorff negative collection, department staff identified numerous wet collodion glass plates that reproduced four images of the same Laurent subject on a single plate measuring 8 x 10 inches. This was the Soule Company’s method of mass production, and explained the smaller prints. All told, the Department of Image Collections has at least 502 original large format albumen photographs by Laurent and his company, and 159 smaller reproductions by Soule in the Gramstorff glass plate negative and photograph collection.

J. Laurent and Company, Cibeles Fountain, Madrid, c. 1875, collodion negative by the Soule Art Publishing Co., Boston, c. 1880, Department of Image Collections, Gramstorff photograph and glass plate negative collection, National Gallery of Art Library

An inkjet print made from a positive digital scan of the contents of the negative

Throughout his entire career, Laurent made albumen prints from collodion negatives. The marriage of these two revolutionary technologies, first developed in the early 1850s, produced the amazing clarity and sharpness of his photographs. Detail is rendered in an extraordinary fashion in both the light and dark areas of the photographs, with the shadows especially teeming with palpable depth and life. Juan Laurent became an exceptional practitioner of the new technologies, and he and his firm used them to communicate a truly monumental artistic vision for thirty years.

J. Laurent, Helmet with gorget of Philip III, made in Pamplona, 1863–1868, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library

To achieve the high resolution and clarity afforded by the collodion and albumen processes, photographers like Juan Laurent were willing to suffer the inconvenience of transporting a cumbersome portable laboratory darkroom to often remote sites where they would have to laboriously develop their hand-crafted collodion negatives right after exposing them. To this end, Laurent was certainly aided by the nascent Spanish railroad system and the contacts he had made when he first photographed railroad tunnels, bridges, stations, and other public works for the Spanish government in the 1850s and 1860s. His portable darkrooms could now be transported relatively easily in railroad baggage cars to remote and exotic areas in Spain that had little-known architectural gems and that had hitherto been accessible only by mule-drawn diligencias, or stagecoaches. Without the railroads, Laurent’s encyclopedic photographic survey of Spanish art and architecture would have been impossible.

Very little has been published in English about Juan Laurent’s life, and only two small Laurent exhibitions have taken place in the United States –one at the University of  Arizona in 2001, and the other at the University of Washington in 2007. The amount of published research in Spanish, on the other hand, is considerable, with much of it in Spanish exhibition and museum catalogues. This research has been enthusiastically conducted over the last thirty years by an impressive group of specialists who take great pride in this French expatriate whose excellent archive has helped form the national image of Spain (and Portugal) during the nineteenth century. One such specialist is Carlos Teixidor Cadenas, a renowned Laurent scholar and authority on Spanish nineteenth-century photography, who works as a photo conservator in the photo archive of the Archivo Ruiz Vernacci in the Spanish Ministry of Culture in Madrid –the archive that has had the old Juan Laurent collodion negatives since their purchase by the Spanish State in 1975.  Mr. Teixidor responded to initial inquiries by generously donating numerous books and exhibition catalogues on Laurent and Spanish photography to the National Gallery of Art Library, and by offering advice throughout the exhibition process.

J. Laurent, North Station, Barcelona (Zaragoza to Pamplona and Barcelona Railway), c. 1864-1867, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library

Laurent exhibitions in Spain and Portugal since 1975 have multiplied. Many of them explored Laurent’s topographical activity in Spanish provincial capitals like Ávila, Valencia, Seville, Granada, and La Rioja, and one exhibition in the Museo Municipal de Madrid (now known as the Museo de la Historia) focused on his photographs of artists and politicians. In 1869, Laurent organized a campaign in Portugal where he used his small darkroom mounted on wheels to photograph Portuguese monuments, art collections, and members of the Portuguese royal family. His Portuguese photographs have been the subjects of two large exhibitions in Lisbon and Oporto in the last three years.

Jean Bautiste Laurent y Minier was born to French parents in Garchizy near Nevers in eastern France. When in 1843 at age 27 he immigrated to Madrid, he changed his first name to the Spanish equivalent Juan, and it was with “Juan” that his tombstone in a Madrid cemetery is inscribed. But he was best known simply as J. Laurent, the brand name he adopted for his photography company and the name he printed on all his photographs.

J. Laurent, General view of the Puerta del Sol, Madrid, 1862, albumen silver print, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library

Laurent’s first occupation in Madrid appears to have been as a manufacturer of marbleized papers and luxury cardboard containers, the former used for endpapers of books of the period, and the latter for pastry and candy boxes. He is documented as receiving medals twice for his decorative paper products in the 1848 and 1850 Industrial Expositions of Madrid. An inheritance from his father, who was 75 when his son was born and who died in 1818, may have enabled Laurent to establish his papíer marbre business on Calle Olivo in Madrid, which he ran until 1857 when his photography studio started to be profitable. He married a French-born widow whose husband ran a pastry shop on the same street.

Apart from Spanish census records and the records of the French embassy in Madrid, Laurent left a clear paper trail in a number of Spanish patent applications that demonstrate his resourceful, inventive spirit. In 1855, a year before opening his photography studio, he applied for a patent for a method of coloring photographs of portraits, landscapes, and works of art; in 1863 he patented an invention that applied photographic images to hand fans; and in 1865, Laurent collaborated with François Willème (1830-1905) in producing “photosculptures” of the Spanish Royal Family. This process involved surrounding a subject with 24 cameras and simultaneously taking photographs that were then mechanically turned into a three-dimensional clay sculpture. It does not appear that he practiced the earlier Daguerreotype or calotype techniques before adopting the wet collodion/albumen process. His invention of Leptographic paper with his partner the Spanish photographer José Martínez Sánchez was intended as an alternative to albumen paper that however did not prove commercially viable.

One of Laurent’s interesting private commissions was photographing the frescoes of Francisco Goya known as the Black Paintings in situ before they were removed from the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, the painter’s home in Madrid. The photographs may have been commissioned to aid the Museo del Prado conservator who executed the risky transfer of the wall paintings to canvas. Laurent’s photographs are the only extant photographs of the Goya masterworks in their original location. In 2011, the Laurent negatives of the Black Paintings in the Archivo Ruiz Vernacci were re-dated. After a careful six-month study, Carlos Teixidor announced in a Spanish journal dated December 2011 that the negatives previously thought to be from the mid-1860s were really made c.1874. Interestingly, these negatives have been used in recent years as evidence in arguments, both pro and con, that the Black Paintings are not by Goya, but by Goya’s son Javier or another unknown artist.

Installation view of "The Solemnity of Shadows"

Family members and successor administrators actively commercialized Laurent’s archive of glass negatives long after he retired from business. His classic images were published in postcards, guidebooks, art history books and encyclopedias well into the twentieth century. Some examples of these in the National Gallery of Art Library are the Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana, an early twentieth-century Spanish encyclopedia; the remarkable books about Spain and Spanish art published by Albert F. Calvert (1872-1946) who procured his old Juan Laurent images from the Juan Laurent successor, Joseph Lacoste; España, sus monumentos y artes, su naturaleza e historia, the earliest volumes of which were published while Juan Laurent was still alive and which reproduce Laurent photographs by the then new halftone printing process. There is also a catalogue of the arms and armor in the Royal Armory published in 1898 by Laurent’s stepdaughter, Catalina Dosch de Roswag and her husband Alfonso. The Department of Image Collections also preserves a rare postcard by the Laurent firm that was printed on Leptographic paper. Researchers are welcome to make an appointment with the Library to view any of the books or with the Department of Image Collections to view any of the photographs by Juan Laurent described in this article.

In 1881, Juan Laurent was recognized for his contributions to the Spanish nation by being named a Knight of the Order of George III by King Alphonse XII.  Although he was famous during his lifetime, the continuing state of disrepair of his tomb in Madrid and the resistance by Spanish authorities to have it conserved and made an historic monument speaks of his present status as somewhere between fame and oblivion.  The jagged fragments of his ruined tomb suggest however that he has broken free of death and has risen nonetheless to his rightful place in the pantheon of Spanish photography.

- Contributed by Thomas A. O’Callaghan, image specialist for Spanish art, National Gallery of Art, Washington

The National Gallery of Art Library is pleased to present an exhibition entitled “In the Library: Marks of Ownership,” on view in the East Building, Ground Floor, Study Center, open Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. For admission, please come to the guard’s desk at the Study Center entrance.

Shalimar will succeed Sarah Osborne Bender, who will move into the Chairpersonship on January 1, 2012.

I’d also like to extend a special thanks to our candidates, Heather Slania and Marla DiVietro, for making this year’s race so exciting! I know everyone in the chapter appreciates their commitment and hard work.

Here’s to an exciting 2012!

Best,
Anne Simmons
Chair, ARLIS/D.C.-Md.-Va.

Thanks,

Anne Simmons

Chair, ARLIS/D.C.-Md.-Va.

2012 Vice-Chair / Chair-Elect Candidates:

Marla DiVietro

Hi Everyone! I’m excited to be running for Vice-chair.
I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005 with a degree in Art History.
I am currently finishing up my last year at Catholic University’s Library Science program and work at Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in the library and as Visual Resources Associate.
I am looking forward to getting to know everyone in our local chapter better.

Heather Slania

I am pleased to accept the nomination for Vice Chair of ARLIS/DMV. Attending my first ARLIS/NA conference in 2010 was an inspiring experience. At last I found my home in librarianship and vowed I would find ways to help our profession successfully navigate the future. As Vice Chair of ARLIS/DMV, I would assist our membership as we move forward. For the benefit of chapter members in making their decision during this election, I have outlined my experience and vision.

I began my career in libraries and art 15 years ago at Northwestern University, as a studio art major working in the library’s Conservation Lab. Since then I have worked at a paraprofessional level in almost every library department. I received my MLS in 2007 at the University of Maryland with an Archives concentration. For the past five years I have worked as a librarian at both University of Maryland and Georgetown performing original cataloging, reference, instruction, Special Collections, and art bibliography. In April 2011 I became the Director of the Library and Research Center at the National Museum of Women in the Arts where I am using every skill I’ve learned, and learning new skills, to revitalize a once shuttered art library.

With my new position as Director I crafted a vision for my library and am working to make it into a reality. I can help do that for ARLIS/DMV. My ideas for our chapter are built on conversations I’ve had with many ARLIS/DMV members over the last two years. ARLIS/DMV should set an example for excellence by engaging in issues of both local and national importance. We are helped in this endeavor by the exceptional librarians in our area, two library schools, and our location close to the seat of the United States government.

ARLIS/DMV should be a leader amongst the regional divisions of ARLIS/NA in three ways:

1. Provide professional development opportunities for our members

2. Contribute towards the national dialogue on issues facing art librarianship

3. Sponsor outreach and mentorship opportunities for library school students

First, in addition to providing networking, our meetings should offer significant professional development through workshops and lectures on topics requested by members. These learning opportunities should encourage more people to join as members and boost meeting attendance. Also, we should create more such opportunities outside of our meetings. Secondly, hosting the 2014 ARLIS/NA conference will showcase the excellent work that our chapter does as well as provide a uniquely political location for conversations concerning art librarianship in the 21^stcentury. While we are busy preparing for the conference, our chapter should engage with emerging challenges and publish our thoughts and experiences with these issues to put us at the forefront of art librarianship. Finally, let us provide more mentorship opportunities for students interested in art libraries including resume workshops and field trips. Outreach programs can work to introduce the field of art librarianship to many student groups and help diversify our field.

Thank you for the nomination and good luck to all those nominated.

Shalimar Fojas White

It would be an honor to be considered as a candidate for Vice-Chair of the ARLIS/DC-MD-VA chapter in 2012. I have been a member of the local chapter for 5 years and a member of the national organization for 7 years. While I was a student at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, I received the Celine Palatsky Travel Award from the ARLIS/NY chapter, which allowed me to attend the 2004 ARLIS/NA conference in New York. This support provided me with my first introduction to art librarians as a group, a formative experience that led me to this profession. As I noted in my conference report: “Being a first-time ARLIS/NA attendee was rather like going to a foreign country, being temporarily bewildered by the language and customs of the inhabitants, and then… discovering that it feels a lot like home. As the name of the professional organization suggests, art librarians speak a unique language made up of many acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. They use these terms with great facility, but are not reluctant to explain their expansions to uninitiated students like myself. All in all, the conference was a very positive experience, reinforcing my desire to enter a profession filled with such passionate and welcoming practitioners.” So, from the very beginning of my career as a librarian, ARLIS/NA and my local chapter played a vital role in inspiring, supporting, and encouraging my professional development. For this, I am deeply grateful and thus very eager to contribute to our local chapter and the society as a whole.

After completing my M.S. in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute, I joined the ARTstor Digital Library, first as a Public Services Librarian and then as a Collection Development Manager. During much of this time, I was commuting between New York and Washington, D.C. and endeavored to be as active as possible in both chapters and the national organization. In the past, I have served as chair of the ARLIS/NA Membership committee (2008-2010) and as a member of the Gerd Muehsam Award committee (2008-2011). Currently, I am serving as a member of the International Relations committee and just joined the Research and Travel Awards sub-committees. Last year, I left ARTstor to assume the role of Manager of the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Now that I am in DC full-time, I would like to become more active in the local chapter and contribute to the planning for the 42^nd annual ARLIS/NA conference in 2014. Having been introduced to the profession through such a positive conference experience, I am excited about the opportunity to draw new professionals to the field by showcasing the passion, knowledge, and expertise of its current practitioners in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area.

MICA: Making History /Making Art by Douglas L. Frost was recently awarded the 2011 Arline Custer Award by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC). The book, published by Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA),  covers nearly two centuries (1826-2011) of the Baltimore art school’s history.

About the Book:

On November 3, 1825, in a large assembly room on South Charles Street a group of Baltimore’s leading citizens met to organize a new educational institution they called ‘The Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts.’

Thus begins the story of present-day Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and the text of MICA: Making History / Making Art by Douglas L. Frost. The book utilizes hundreds of documents—texts and images—from sources held in the MICA Archives at the Decker Library & Media Resources Collection and in other collections in Baltimore and beyond.

From its roots as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, the College’s history spans the great advances in technology of the Industrial Revolution to the fast-paced, ever changing technology of the Digital Age. This resilient institution endured the upheavals of Civil, World and Cold wars, the Great Fire of Baltimore and the Great Depression, the politically tumultuous Sixties and the sobering realities of the 21st century—and not only survived but thrived. The threads of MICA’s history are interwoven with those of America itself, with links to historical and cultural icons including Noah Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Louis Kahn, Alistair Cooke, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Rauschenberg.

MICA’s nearly two-century history is told through 336 pages of flowing narrative and more than 450 images. The layers of history, from 1826 through the present and looking into the future, are written by Vice President for Development Emeritus Douglas L. Frost, who undertook this extensive research project upon his 2006 retirement after 40 years of service to the College, in the course of which he became the school’s de facto historian.

Opening essays for MICA: Making History / Making Art have been written by Baltimore Museum of Art Director Doreen Bolger, 1976 alumnus Jeff Koons, President Fred Lazarus, and Walters Art Museum Director Gary Vikan. The oversized, full-color, hard-cover, Smyth-bound book—an artwork in itself—was designed in the Baltimore office of international design firm Pentagram by MICA faculty Abbott Miller and alumnus Jeremy Hoffman (2000), and printed by Schmitz Press in Sparks, Maryland. The book’s large format provides ample space to appreciate distinctive imagery from nearly two centuries of Baltimore’s and MICA’s interwoven history.

Further information about the book, including a link to the MICA Store where the book is available for purchase, is at the following link:
http://www.mica.edu/About_MICA/Facts_and_History/MICA_History_Book.html

Our day began in a meeting room at the Victor Building where the library for the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery is housed. Library director Doug Litts welcomed us with coffee and pastries. Our program began with a greeting from Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. Martin graciously acknowledged the value of art librarians and archivists in the research for notable exhibitions such as Hide/Seek, Seeing Gertrude Stein, and an upcoming show on artistic representations of the war of 1812.

Our first presentation of the day was from Erin Rushing, Digital Images Librarian for the Smithsonian as well as the Social Media Co-Chair for the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. She discussed the recent effort to coordinate social media outreach over a variety of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and the Smithsonian Libraries blog. She discussed the advantages of group participation in keeping ideas varied and fresh. Documentation of social media practices and guidelines is thorough and an internal calendar is used to keep content managed and regularly published. Erin shared examples of the limited marketing the group has done for their social media outlets, mentioning that their flyers and cards have made appearance at conferences. Giving everyone a chuckle, she let us in on what content gets the best response in social media with “pretty pictures” and anything food-related leading the way, followed, surprisingly, by the extreme niche subject of antique sewing machines. She emphasized the value of interdepartmental collaboration in the group and says that the group is looking forward to new platforms and focusing on engaging audiences rather than simply new ways to disseminate information.

Next, Doug Litts gave an informative talk called “Smithsonian Libraries Digital Library: Continuing to Evolve”, a wide-reaching presentation reflecting the broad efforts of the libraries to leverage their holdings with a multitude of digital projects. Having begun digital projects in 1990’s, Smithsonian Libraries has had a lot of experience presenting a variety of materials from their collection in different ways online. Unfortunately, this has resulted in retrieval problems across the many separate resources. The Digital Services Working Group has been created to try to solve this problem by use of federated search and a new discovery system (still under review). Doug also led us through an exploration of some of the online resources offered by Smithsonian Libraries such as the Art and Artists Files database, and a large collection documenting lighting design in New York from the Cooper Hewitt. Many of us were interested in Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web. He also showed us examples of publications scanned by Smithsonian Libraries and made available on the Internet Archive. Doug noted that almost all of the American Art/Portrait Gallery Library’s pre-1923 monographs have been scanned and they are starting on serials. There was also discussion about the Galaxy of Images, Smithsonian Libraries’ online image library that attempts to free images from the constraints of their physical housing and present them online for use by scholars and the general public. The lasting impression is that Smithsonian Libraries are actively embracing and testing the ideas of what digital libraries can present to online audiences and can serve as a model for our field.

Doug’s talk was momentarily paused for another warm welcome from Mary Augusta Thomas, Deputy Director for Smithsonian Libraries. She spoke briefly about the challenges of being a library system made comprised of 20 branches not only of diverse topics such as art and design and natural history, but stretched across an entire hemisphere.

Our business meeting was brief and touched on the early stages of planning for our 2014 Washington D.C. ARLIS/NA conference. Everyone is anxious for details!

After lunch, the group reconvened at the Freer and Sackler Galleries where we were met by librarians Katherine Phillips and Yue Shu. A brief tour of the reading room and stacks included some history on the founding of the Freer museum and library with emphasis on Freer’s dedication to and continuous support of libraries and books.

We moved into the galleries for a fascinating and spirited tour and discussion with David Hogge of his exhibition Power|Play: China’s Empress Dowager. As a cataloger, I was delighted to hear that the idea for the show came from David’s desire to improve his cataloging skills by creating MARC records for these mysterious glass plate negatives that had languished in the collection since the 1960’s. The result was some great detective work, a fascinating exploration of the Empress Dowager, and a beautifully dramatic installation.

Finally, we returned to the reading room for a quick look at some of the library’s resources on the history of Chinese fashion and related images from the time of the Empress Dowager. Yue Shu showed us a variety of Chinese books, some rare, demonstrating their unique binding, accordion folding, and illustration.

The meeting was a great combination of professional development and enjoyable observation.

The Vice-Chair acts as chief executive officer in the event that the Chair is unable to serve, assists with programming, keeps meeting minutes, and automatically serves as Chair in 2012. The Vice-Chair must be a 2011 member of the local and national chapters.

If you have someone you’d like to nominate or would like to volunteer, please email both Anne Simmons, Chair at a-simmons@nga.gov and Megan Halsband, Secretary/Treasurer, at m-hals@loc.gov.

Official ballots will available in late November/early December.