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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am posting this for Macie Hall from the VRA-L regarding the CAA-ACLS Town Meetings. Gregory P. J. Most Chief Slide Librarian National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C. [log in to unmask] ########################################################## I'm finally getting "back in the saddle" after a bout of flu. Although some time has passed, I felt that I needed to add my two cents to Maryly Snow's report on the CAA-ACLS Town Meeting in New York. First of all, the whole idea of having a town meeting is to allow the airing of various points of view. If only the educators/users viewpoints are voiced, we might as well call it a pep rally. The fact is that there are within the community which will be affected by these guidelines, many diverse points of view: artists, museums, educators, librarians, scholars, to name a few. Each of the speakers at the Cooper Union Meeting represented a different constituency. It is very important that we keep our minds open and try to understand these different points of view if we are going to craft guidelines which will "work." It is nice to hear an attorney like Fred de Kuyper (Johns Hopkins Univeristy) who supports a point of view favorable to those of us in the VRA community who work in academic slide collections. However, it is useful to know that he is a liberal in this regard, and that other attorneys, such as Barbara English (University of Maryland), feel that they are protecting their institution against legal action (which is their job) by adopting a more conservative stance. Barbara (who lives in Baltimore, and is a friend of mine) and I have spent hours discussing this, and as a capable intellectual she can see both sides, but has an obligation in her position to do for her institution what she feels can be legally supported. She regretted having to leave the meeting early to attend to the needs of her two small children. Neither Pat Williams nor Cameron Kitchen left the meeting early. In fact, Pat Williams was the moderator for the afternoon session. She is also very aware of "our" position, but as a representative of a certain constituency, must look to the needs of that group. Also, although I may have numerous criticisms about the CONFU process, it is not true (as Maryly Snow stated) that "...most of the education of participants occurred in individual meetings." The fact is that most of the first year of CONFU was an educational process in the full session meetings. For example, I did a live computer presentation to the full group in April 1995 on art and image related web pages and the use of such pages in the educational process. It was not until the winter of 1996, that the working groups began meeting in the process of writing guidelines, over a year after the CONFU process began. Rather than attacking CAA-ACLS, I feel that they should be commended for putting together such an informative program on very short notice, and for attempting to get information out to interested parties on the CONFU process and the proposed guidelines. We can stick our heads in the sand and refuse to see that there are other points of view, but in the end that is not going to be particularly useful to our cause. Macie Hall Virginia M.G. Hall, Curator Art History Visual Resources Collection Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218 Tel: 410-516-7122 Fax: 410-516-5188 [log in to unmask]