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Art DocumentationArt Documentation is the official bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 1982-present. It includes articles and information relevant to art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Since 1996, it has been published twice yearly (spring and fall). The subscription to Art Documentation is included as part of membership in ARLIS/NA. To obtain individual issues, see ordering information below. Cost is $10.00 per issue, plus the following applicable shipping fees: USA/Canada $6.00; international (outside USA/Canada) $9.00. All prices in $US.Current Issue AbstractsSpring 2010: Volume 29, Issue 1Documenting WPA Murals in CaliforniaLaurel Bliss and Melissa Lamont Librarians at San Diego State University developed a database and research guide as part of their inventory of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals in California. The project was inspired by the discovery of several Depression-era murals on campus, and it was designed to help place those murals into their historical context. The hours spent researching and tracking down murals resulted in a searchable online inventory documenting over 350 murals. This article describes the background to the project, the methodology used to inventory and photograph the murals, and the resulting image database. Drawing on Imagination: Children’s Art in the Academic Library Kathleen C. Lonbom The study of children's art spans the disciplines of fine art, history, social and political sciences, and psychology. There are relatively few cohesive children's art collections. One such collection, the International Collection of Child Art (ICCA), comprises more than 10,000 works from the latter half of the twentieth century and resides at Illinois State University's Milner Library. This article describes the collection, discusses its acquisition by the library, and presents specific uses of this collection in research and teaching. Recent grant-funded initiatives, which have helped to successfully fund research and development of the collection and enhance access for users through digitization, are also featured. "L'imagerie sucrée": Challenges in Cataloging and Researching Nineteenth-Century French Candy Wrappers Nicole Belolan The cataloging of a collection of French candy wrappers in the Winterthur Library's Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera was completed under the auspices of a semester-long graduate-level connoisseurship independent study. The project involved cataloging the collection and preparing a finding aid for a library and museum whose collection focuses on books, documents, ephemera, and objects associated with American material life. Completing the project within this context posed several challenges. This article describes the project's scope, explains the author's cataloging methodology for this unique collection, describes the history of candy and candy wrappers, notes the relevant resources available in the United States, and contextualizes how this collection of French printed ephemera is technically and visually relevant to American and European popular visual culture of the same period. "There Ain't Anything in This World That Sells a Book Like a Pretty Cover": Nineteenth-Century Publishers' Bookbindings in Library Collections Betsy Butler The bookbindings that publishers created between 1830 and 1910 are some of the most beautiful mass-produced objects of the Victorian era. Looking carefully at book covers reveals details about the printing industry during the nineteenth century, how these bindings were created, and how they mirror aesthetic sensibilities of the day. By recognizing the distinctive characteristics of bindings for each decade in which they were produced and noting them in catalog records, instruction sessions, and exhibits, librarians can creatively call attention to publishers' bookbindings as valuable cultural artifacts in library collections. Art in Special Collections: Latino and African American Fine Art and Photography Collections in Academic Institutions Rebecca Hankins and Miguel Juárez Often university libraries or archive/special collections house large fine art and photographic collections by African American and Latino artists. These collections are frequently hidden due to inadequate funding to promote them, minimal exhibit space, insufficient staffing with requisite exhibition and curatorial expertise, and/or diminished cataloging or digital priority. This article seeks to address the concerns and issues that affect this lack of exposure within academic special collections in both large and small institutions. The intent is to highlight successful strategies that can be used by other repositories seeking to diversify their art and photography holdings. University of Kansas Print and Electronic Journal Comparison Study Adam Robinson In the spring of 2008, the Collection Development Department at the University of Kansas Libraries undertook an initiative to reduce costs by eliminating print subscriptions to journals it was receiving electronically. A study was designed to determine how this might impact students, faculty, and other patrons of the Murphy Art & Architecture Library. As a direct result, the majority of print art journals under consideration were retained, largely due to inconsistencies in content and quality found within the electronic versions. Following is an outline of the study's procedure and a discussion of the findings. Impact of Image Quality in Online Art History Journals: A User Study Steve McCann and Tammy Ravas Upon conducting a serials review to prepare for conversion of art journal subscriptions from print to electronic format, the visual and performing arts librarian at the University of Montana discovered that many of the articles in these online journals had poor image quality. This fostered further inquiry into how poor image quality affected graduate student and faculty experience in using online art journals for research. As a result, a user study on this topic was conducted in the fall of 2008. Eight graduate students and faculty from the School of Art discussed their experience of reading an excerpt of an art history journal article with poor image quality. The goals of this study were to discover art scholars' perceptions when encountering digitally reproduced journal articles, examine the effect of poor image quality art reproductions in art scholarly literature among sophisticated readers, and examine the effects of art reproduction placement in an online art history journal article. Looking to the Future While Learning from the Past: Information Seeking in the Visual Arts Catherine Larkin At the core of this study is the perception that overall, scholars in the visual arts have unique requirements in their information seeking behaviors and processes and that there has been an extraordinary deficiency and lack of progress in understanding and addressing their needs. A self-administered questionnaire, adapted from previous studies, was used to query subsets of visual arts humanities scholars from three academic institutions on demographic information, their use of information resources, and their approaches to locating information. Although former studies raised important questions about the idiosyncratic information-seeking behaviors of visual arts humanities scholars and their methodologies, a current understanding of the information-seeking behaviors and processes of the domain is necessary to document persistent and distinctive information requirements within the population, to note changes over time, and to determine the extent to which technology has impacted the information-seeking experience within the domain. Information Literacy Through Site-Specific Installation: The Library Project Stacy Brinkman and Sara Young This article describes how a collaborative, multifaceted, site-specific installation helped to develop information literacy in studioart students. Through the process of planning, creating, and installing the project, students learned to find and evaluate many different kinds of information, from design ideas to historical precedents, site plans, and business plans. Working with a public installation within a library, students learned to consider the economic, social, and legal issues involved within the context of their audience and location. Finally, the conceptual framework of the installation encouraged students to think critically about the role of libraries in today's information and technology-saturated society. Development of the Getty Vocabularies: AAT, TGN, ULAN, and CONA Patricia Harpring The Getty vocabularies, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names® (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names® (ULAN), contain terms, names, and other information about people, places, things, and concepts used to catalog, document, and retrieve information relating to art, architecture, and other material culture. The vocabularies grow over time through contributions from the user community, which include art libraries, visual resources collections, museums, archives, and scholars. The Getty vocabularies are widely used in cataloging communities, where some of the most frequently asked questions concern the history, production, and ongoing development of these vocabularies. This article attempts to answer such questions and provides an introduction to the newest Getty vocabulary, The Cultural Objects Name Authority™ (CONA). Top of Page Tables of Contents
To search Art Documentation contents prior to the issues listed above, please use the LISTA database, provided by Ebsco. Top of Page Ordering InformationThe subscription to Art Documentation is included as part of membership in ARLIS/NA. To obtain individual issues, please contact:ARLIS/NA Publications 7044 South 13th Street Oak Creek, WI. 53154 USA Phone: 800-817-0621 ext. 450 Fax: 403-541-0915 Email: publications@arlisna.org. Top of Page |
