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Dear Colleagues:

 

Dec arts are alive and well, and used to be at ARLIS ….  There was a “Dec Arts Round Table” (known as DART) which morphed into the Dec Arts Special Interest Group (SIG).  This SIG has been inactive for several years, and we have a chance to revive it if we want to. 

 

Interested ARLIS attendees are encouraged to attend a meeting on Friday April 26, 2013 4:45pm - 5:45pm in Ballroom A at the Convention Center to chart our future (if we have one).  I’ve been tapped to facilitate this gathering, which I hope will involve lively discussion and identify a few projects or programs to work on.

 

Here are some discussion points. Stephen Van Dyk at the Cooper Hewitt Museum Library (Smithsonian) was helpful in making some of these suggestions.  He is with us in spirit and will be at next year’s conference in Washington.

 

If any of these issues excite you, please join us and think about taking an active role!

 

Dec Arts-focused programs for the DC conference (2013)

·         what are some ideas exploration

 

Digitization:

·         who is digitizing what?

·         what standard repository is housing digitized items?  Internet Archive, etc.

·         need for a site-finding aid for identifying where digitized versions of partial sets are digitized by different institutions?

·         need to digitize more ceramic/metal/furniture/ other manufacturer makers’ mark resources (the one digitized by the Cooper Hewitt is the most visited online resource from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries)

 

Trade Catalogs

·         essential tools for Dec Arts – how are they used?

·         special things to know about acquiring, cataloging, housing, access

·         develop an ARLIS session on this subject?

 

Designers – Primary source materials

·         who collects primary source material on designers (industrial, graphic, interior, etc.)- create a guide?

·         plan a session on the idiosyncracies of dealing with this kind of material?

 

World’s Fairs and Dec Arts

·         always a challenging topic to research

·         develop a session?

·         who has definitive collections?

 

Blog on new Dec Arts publications, resources (see the CHM website for the object-of-the-day feature (http://www.cooperhewitt.org/object-of-the-day) or ?

 

Finding stuff

·         need an international directory of decorative arts resources (another way of dealing with “who collects…”)

·         do we need reference guides/pathfinders (etc.) on other topics?

 

MORE???  Your ideas, please!

 

 

Best, Linda

 

 

Linda Seckelson
Principal Reader Services Librarian
The Museum Libraries
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10028
T: 212 570-3739; F: 212 570-3847
email: [log in to unmask]