Dear ARLIS/NA Community,

On behalf of the ARLIS/NA Executive Board, I’m excited to share with you numerous important updates regarding ARLIS/NA initiatives, staff changes at ARLIS/NA Headquarters, and other Society business. For those of you who participated in our Seattle conference with VRA back in March, I hope you found the experience as inspiring and educational as I did. A high point in Seattle was meeting face-to-face with so many of you and hearing your ideas and feedback that were sparked by conference programming. The board and I heard from you via hallway chats, in committee meetings, at the Diversity Forum, and at our various festivities throughout the conference. During one hallway chat with members after our Membership Meeting, a recommendation was made to formally endorse President Obama’s nomination of Carla Hayden as Librarian of Congress. I subsequently presented this idea to the board, which they voted unanimously to approve, and the endorsement was sent out just before Hayden’s nomination was approved by Congress. The board and I are here to help you advance, sustain, and move forward our profession and we welcome your ideas. For your convenience, here’s a link to our organizational chart that shows which board member reports to which ARLIS/NA group.

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of joining our Conference Planning Committee (CPAC) in New Orleans to prepare for our 2017 conference. (I’ve included a couple of pictures below.) Thanks to all of you who submitted such engaging and timely proposals. Our CPAC has organized an incredible program for the conference that they will share with you soon. You can look forward to a very dynamic program of workshops and presentations, a special Leadership Institute, and inspiring guest speakers.

One of ARLIS/NA’s new strategic directions is to serve as a community of practice for the exploration, cultivation, and sharing of innovative approaches and emerging technologies in libraries and art librarianship. At the Seattle conference, the board voted to form an Open Access Task Force to research and develop recommendations for the implementation of an ARLIS/NA open access publishing program that builds upon the Society’s existing open access Learning Portal service. This group is chaired by Daniel Payne, a member of the Public Policy Committee that contributed a preliminary report and recommendations to the board earlier this year. You can look forward to hearing from this task force and the board on this issue at the national conference. Additionally, in response to the College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, a project is being coordinated by Public Policy Committee chair, Alex Watkins, and several other ARLIS/NA members to develop instructional materials for teaching fair use guidelines in library research skills sessions. This project is being coordinated across several ARLIS/NA committees, divisions, sections, SIGs and other groups, including the PPC, the Academic Division, the Professional Development Committee, the Teaching SIG, and with VRA and CAA.

A task force chaired by Stacy Brinkman distributed a Census of Art Information Professionals back in March and is now hard at work analyzing the results (572 individuals participated in the survey). This survey represents the first attempt by our society to survey the demographic makeup of our field and beyond what is already collected via annual ARLIS/NA membership forms. We look forward to sharing their report with you by early this fall. 

Earlier this year the executive management firm that ARLIS/NA has a contract with (TEI) merged with another company and changed its name to Association Executives Group (AEG). Information on the ARLIS/NA website has been updated to account for this name change. All contact information will remain the same. Please continue to contact AEG headquarters directly regarding your membership-related questions or to report problems with the website. If you have ARLIS/NA governance, policy, or procedural questions, please contact members of the Executive Board in particular the board liaisons assigned to the ARLIS/NA groups you work with directly. In May, I was introduced to Denise Harris, AEG’s president. The board and I are working with Ms. Harris and Robert Kopchinski, our Executive Director who works for AEG, to ensure a smooth transition.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge requests from some members of the Society for the Executive Board address the recent library closures and reorganizations that have been posted on ARLIS-L. We want you to know that these changes are on our radar and that the Museum Division has been tasked with creating a white paper on the current issues and trends faced specifically by art museum librarians. We hope this white paper will give ARLIS/NA a mechanism to share insights with art museum leaders and other key constituents into the positive impacts library staff have in supporting scholarship, research, and discovery in the visual arts.

I hope you have a lovely summer.

 

Sincerely,

                      

Heather Gendron                                                                   

ARLIS/NA President

 

CPAC members worked on the program and budget over a two-day period at our conference hotel, the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans.

 

Taking a well-deserved break and enjoying riverside views right outside the hotel!