EARLIER TODAY I SENT THIS SAME MESSAGE, BUT WITH THE WRONG ATTACHMENT!  I MEANT TO ATTACH THE SURVEY RESULTS AND I ATTACHED A CONTACT LIST INSTEAD!!  SORRY--IT WAS JUST ONE OF THOSE DAYS . . . . HERE IS THE MESSAGE WITH THE CORRECT ATTACHMENT.  --JOAN

Dear Colleagues:

Last May I conducted what turned out to be a tiny survey of solo librarians’ ability to attend the ARLIS/NA national conference.  Only 20 people responded to an informal survey posted Mary 20 on ARLIS-L and of those 20, only 7 had attended the conference in Ft. Worth.  But the survey results include responses from the 13 who did not attend as well as the 7 who did.  Hardly worthy of being called a “survey,” the responses are interesting and I promised to post them to ARLIS-L, so here they are (attached).  

Those numbers (7 out of 20) do not reflect percentages of conference attendees as a whole or percentages of solo librarians/art information professionals attending the conference.  Of course I don’t think that we know how many ARLIS/NA members are in solo positions.  I would like to suggest that the conference evaluation form for Seattle include a question about whether or not an attendee is a solo art information professional.

The recently reinstated Solo Art Information Professionals SIG now has a contact list of 30 people and they include (along with the usual suspects of museum librarians and visual resource curators) art, architecture, and design school librarians and several who work for independent agencies (both nonprofit and commercial) and artists’ archives.  As I discovered when I did a survey of “small art museum libraries” back in 2002, the directors of some fairly large art museum libraries actually fly solo.  It’s a (growing?) population of people who have library degrees, some with specializations in art librarianship or archives, some with dual degrees in LIS and art history.  Many are content.  They usually have volunteers and/or interns to assist.  But they all struggle to do what is needed in their libraries—everything—and they are among the most appreciative of ARLIS/NA, especially the annual conference, whenever they manage to get a travel award or pull together other personal and institutional resources to attend.

Lucy Campbell ([log in to unmask]), Librarian, Welsh Library, New School of Architecture & Design in San Diego, has volunteered to be the principal contact for the new Solo SIG.  Let her know if you are interested!

Joan M. Benedetti