UCLA VRC Closure

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Dear All,

It is with great sadness that I must announce the closure of the VRC in the Department of Art History at UCLA. On Wednesday, May 8th, Susan Rosenfeld and I were notified by the chair that, effective Friday, May 10th, the VRC was being closed and we were both being laid off. Fortunately, Susan had already announced her intention to retire, and I also had enough credits that I was able to retire. We are now in the process of cleaning out our offices.

Although I have not been an active member of VRA or ARLIS in recent years, I have kept up with events as they unfolded on the listserves, and have often found them informative, helpful and sometimes quite amusing. This is one part of being a VRC curator that I will miss, but now it is time for us to move on to a world without images and babysitting faculty 8 to 5!

I wish you all the best in the future, and leave you with the one word Bob Willis didn't use:

SAYONARA!

David K. Ziegler, Ex-Curator, UCLA Department of Art History Visual Resource Collection
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For those of you who might not know David ([log in to unmask]) and Susan ([log in to unmask]) well, they are terrific colleagues who have not had the institutional support to attend many VRA conferences over the last several years, but have been active in the UC Visual Resources Group and locally in SoCal. They both appropriately focused their energy on developing the UCLA image collections, analog and digital, as well as on acquiring a number of fascinating donations from scholars, some of which have been digitized and been made available in ARTstor (see the Strom collection of Korean art, for an amazing example) and through UC institutional outlets. They both worked in the VRC for many more years than they would probably like me to disclose, so it is a relief to know they can retire with benefits. David and Susan are wonderful colleagues whose support and friendship will always be much appreciated.

VRA has tried to be there for colleagues who find themselves in such a situation. The white paper "Advocating for Visual Resources Management" is still linked from the VRA home page at http://www.vraweb.org/resources/general/vra_white_paper.pdf and has some excellent information about the issues in it. The Transitions group http://www.vraweb.org/resources/education/transitions.html is still around to support colleagues too. Please don't hesitate to contact me if there is anything that I personally can do to assist as well.