Summary: The Artists’ Books Thesaurus is a project spearheaded by a working group of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Book Art Special Interest Group (SIG). It will offer a much-needed vocabulary for indexing artists’ books and their features, ultimately leading to enhanced discovery and cross-collection collocation of artists’ books. The first release--published as both a human-readable, illustrated, browsable, and searchable interface and in Linked Data formats--is ready for review at: http://tinyurl.com/abthes. This presentation will provide an overview of the Thesaurus and its functionality, as well as a history of the working group’s procedures, methods, and discoveries. Library and museum professionals will learn how to apply the Thesaurus to describe and access their collections. Ontology and thesaurus designers will learn how the group used visual content to overcome challenges in knowledge representation. Researchers and artists will learn how to engage with and contribute to the Thesaurus through their work and social media. Initial adoption of the Thesaurus will be voted on at the Book Art SIG meeting at the upcoming ARLIS/NA and VRA joint conference, “Natural Connections,” March 8-12, 2016, Seattle, Washington. This presentation gives the ACRL Arts community a sneak preview of the new Artists’ Books Thesaurus
Summary: Virtual Library of Virginia has a project reviewing video and DVD holdings of eight doctoral institutions across the Commonwealth of Virginia. This presentation will focus on what this has uncovered about art education film holdings and use trends among these collections, as well as how this can help inform collection decisions for these collections and future media purchases for VCU.
Summary: In this virtual discussion forum participants will learn about the advantages and disadvantages of having a subject specific library in close physical proximity to the college and departments it serves. The Performing Arts Library (PAL) at Kennesaw State University is a small, 700 square foot, one room library. Though funded and operated by the University Library System, the PAL is physically separate from the main library and housed in the institution’s College of the Arts (COTA). The PAL contains COTA subject specific material, e.g., play scripts, music scores, study scores, and chamber music. In addition, the PAL is staffed by librarians with performing arts degrees and experience and by student assistants who are performing arts majors. After a brief summary of the history of the PAL, this session will present how such close physical proximity between library and college effects liaison relationships, reference service, technical service, and collection development. The various advantages and disadvantages of such physical proximity will be presented and discussed.