Dear ARLIS/NA colleagues,
The ARLIS/NA Membership Committee is interested in obtaining feedback from
members on the topic of how membership in the Society (ARLIS/NA) has
been of value, or beneficial, to you. We would like to receive short
statements, consisting of no more than a few paragraphs, which will
describe specific benefits, or experiences, that have been important
to you, either professionally or personally.
If you are willing to share your story about what ARLIS/NA membership
means to you, please consider sending us a paragraph or two.
Statements can be e-mailed to [log in to unmask] Below are
examples authored by two of our current Board Members.
Finally, we would like to post statements that are forwarded to us
onto the ARLIS/NA website--sharing this type of information with
others will serve to both attract new members as well as to highlight
current membership diversity and variety in our work settings.
Thank you in advance for participating in this outreach effort!
Best wishes,
Janine Henri and Margaret Boylan
ARLIS/NA Membership Committee
From Jeanne Brown, Head, Architecture Studies Library, University of
Nevada, Las Vegas
"In 1989 I became head of the Creswell Library of Islamic Art and
Architecture at the American University in Cairo. Those were the
days before the Internet, when Bitnet was just starting to become
known. One of the first things I did was to become a member of
ARLIS/NA. My research showed ARLIS/NA to be THE association for arts
information, and my membership put me in contact, albeit very long
distance, with issues and concerns in arts librarianship. Today I am
head of the University of Nevada Architecture Studies Library, the
Internet is a ten-ton gorilla, and my need for and appreciation of
ARLIS/NA remains undiminished. And I have found an unexpected bonus:
when I attend meetings not related to the arts [thanks to the
expansion of my responsibilities for UNLV Libraries assessment] I
always know someone [an ARLIS/NA member] that works with one and
often more of the meeting attendees. I love that "small world"
feeling! Thanks ARLIS/NA!"
From Peggy Keeran, Arts and Humanities Reference Librarian, Penrose
Library, University of Denver
"I have been a member of ARLIS/NA since 1988, and, even though art
librarianship is just a part of my responsibilities as Arts and
Humanities Reference Librarian, in my experience ARLIS/NA offers
conferences with a wide variety of relevant sessions that are useful
not just for art librarianship, but also for other parts of my job.
Discussions about the hidden Internet, information literacy,
copyright, technological advancements, and digital resources are the
same issues discussed at ACRL, but rather than ten sessions on a
variation of a theme, the one or two sessions at ARLIS/NA on a topic
tend to be of very high quality and very informative. Some of the
specialized sessions at ARLIS/NA actually have content which does
translate into other disciplines: for example, services for and
strategies to help studio artists can be used as templates to address
needs of other types of practicing artists, such as creative writers,
dancers, and actors. The means of helping such populations are not
addressed at other types of conferences. In 2000, I was given the
responsibility of purchasing the foreign language materials for
literature - we don't purchase very much for art - and made contact
with the vendors I use for French, Italian and German literatures at
the annual conferences and was able to discuss with them what I
wanted to accomplish with our literary collections.
The sessions at ARLIS/NA tend to be very balanced, so that I don't
feel I'm hearing yet another session on information literacy but
instead am seeing through this focus on a specific kind of
librarianship a larger picture about the practices and theories and
responsibilities of our profession. I continue to find the
conferences I attend invaluable for my development as a librarian
overall as well as my specific responsibilities for the art and art
history department."
__________________________________________________________________
Mail submissions to [log in to unmask]
For information about joining ARLIS/NA see:
http://www.arlisna.org//membership.html
Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc)
to [log in to unmask]
ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance:
http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html
Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at: [log in to unmask]
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