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Features, Interviews, Uncategorized

A Success Story: An Interview with Kraig Binkowski, Chief Librarian of the Reference Collection at the Yale Center for British Art

Written by Autumn Wetli on . Leave a comment

Can you tell us a little bit about your background, your current position, and how you got into the field of art librarianship?
I went to undergraduate school in Detroit, at Wayne State University where I majored in fine arts – printmaking. From there I went to Ohio State University for an MFA degree in printmaking with a focus on intaglio. I returned to Detroit and tried for several years to put food on the table by making prints and teaching. After a particularly lean summer that included working on a bread delivery truck and pressing tile in a pottery, I decided that I needed to change course. I had been exposed to the library science program at Kent State while at OSU and was curious about the program at Wayne State University. I immediately fell in love with Purdy Library and was excited to be able to apply my humanities background to my coursework and then eventually (I hoped) in a professional position. I was drawn to special collections librarianship and though I hoped to be able to work as an art librarian, I was happy to be in any special collection — I worked in the Law Library throughout my time in the LIS program. Shortly after graduation, I was very fortunate that a position as an assistant librarian opened up at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a museum I had loved since childhood. I admittedly had little knowledge of the research library but I immediately clicked with the Head Librarian, Jennifer Moldwin, who took a chance on hiring a librarian/artist with little museum background. Jennifer went on to teach me what it means to be a museum librarian. From the DIA I moved to the Delaware Art Musuem where I was in charge of the small but focused library collections, one of which was a rich research and manuscript collection devoted to the British Pre-Raphaelite artists. This was my first real exposure to British art and artists and it would prove fruitful several years later when I applied for the position of Chief Librarian of the Reference Collection at the Yale Center for British Art. I have been here at Yale for over 12 years now and really love and appreciate not only the work, but also my colleagues and the physical atmosphere of the Center at Yale.

What does a typical day at work look like for you?Unfortunately, many of my days include too many meetings. But, my days always look different from each other and that’s one of the things that initially attracted me to art librarianship – I do research, acquisitions, bib instruction, reference, training; I work with other librarians, interns, students, faculty, museum staff and the general public – all of this means I have to be good at prioritizing and focusing when I need to but it also keeps each day interesting.

Do you have any advice for current students and/or those on the job market?
The scariest thing for a manager and a librarian to do is to hire a new staff member. It’s a daunting task to try and get to know a potential new librarian over interview meetings lasting only a few hours in one day. So, it is very helpful to already have some insights about a candidate, particularly if they have interned or volunteered at the library, or worked with the hiring librarian through ARLIS or some other professional organization. If I don’t know a candidate, I put a lot of stock in the recommendation of my friends and colleagues in the profession, particularly those that I know fairly well. I would recommend to any candidate that they try to let the hiring librarian get to know them in any way possible before the interview – and enlist the help of colleagues that know both you and the hiring librarian.

What were/are some challenges for you as an art librarian? What do you think are current challenges in the field of art librarianship or librarianship in general?
Well, I think funding is a challenge for art libraries and librarians, but that’s always been a challenge – it’s nothing new. I feel one of the biggest challenges for art librarians (particularly in museums) is to stay relevant in an institution – and while that’s a struggle, it’s also one of the things that makes art librarianship exciting. Scholarship is always changing and evolving, the rise of digital scholarship and the technical analysis of objects has opened up new doors that librarians have to be aware of, and to excel at. We never want to be seen as lagging behind the field, but in the forefront, pushing the boundaries.

Tell us something fun about yourself! What do you do in your spare time?
I am a printmaker, as I wrote earlier, and I still make woodcuts for exhibitions in New Haven and around the Northeast, mostly. I have a small etching press that I adapt for wood blocks and commandeer my dining room with the press, paper and tools when I need to print an edition. I have two children that take up a lot of my spare time but I have started to learn to play the guitar recently – so far, I only know two different songs (and not even completely), but it’s a start.

Features, Uncategorized

Materials Collection at The University of Michigan

Written by Autumn Wetli on . Leave a comment
Image of Materials Collection
Image by Sara Samuels

Libraries hold all types of things other than just books. The University of Michigan’s Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library is just one of several academic art libraries that has a Materials Collection. Comprised of around 800 samples, the collection is meant to inspire artists and designers by giving them the opportunity to touch and experience different materials in real life. Most of the collection comes from a materials consultancy company called Material Connexion, but the library adds items by request, too. Its curator, librarian Rebecca Price, hopes that with the growth of the collection and increasing awareness of its existence, more students and faculty will reach out and make requests for materials to purchase.

Image of Materials Collection
Image by Joanna Thielen

Most use of the Materials Collection comes from students and faculty in Architecture or Art & Design programs. Classes have used the collection to create sustainable packaging designs and signage assignments, just to name a few examples. The collection was also used by students in the Dance department who were searching for an iridescent material for costumes. The library will be loaning out some of the collection to be on display at college makerspace, hopefully sparking more interest in the collection.

Snail excrement material
Material made from snail excrement (Image by Sara Samuels)

You can learn more about The University of Michigan’s Materials Collection here. Some other universities I found that house similar collections are Princeton, Harvard, Kendall College of Art and Design, and The University of Utah.

Features, Interviews, Libraries: Academic Art & Architecture, Libraries: Visual Resources Collections, Uncategorized

A Success Story: An Interview with Molly Schoen

Written by Autumn Wetli on . Leave a comment

Molly Schoen works as a Visual Resources Curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She was kind enough to answer a few questions and tell us more about her work and experience!

Can you tell us a little bit about your background, your current position, and how you got into the field of art librarianship?

It all started in my undergrad years (at Michigan State University), when I got a part-time job working in the Government Documents library. I found that I really enjoyed getting things in order, like cleaning up messy catalog records. And I loved the tactile nature of the work, too: bone folders, label makers, tattle tape and date stamps! I was getting a Bachelor’s in English but didn’t know what to do with it, so I decided to go to library school. I ended up getting accepted in to Wayne State University’s Fine & Performing Arts Librarian program, which was great because I’ve always been interested in art and music.

After getting my MLIS, I worked part-time at a collection of modern and contemporary black art in Flint, MI. Three years later, I got a full-time position at the University of Michigan, in their Visual Resources Collections. The experience from that job helped me land my current position of Visual Resources Curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, NY. I’ve been working here for a year and a half now, and I love it!

What does a typical day at work look like for you?
A typical day for me depends on what time of year it is. Right now, in the middle of the summer semester, there’s hardly anyone around. So I use this time to really get in the zone and catch up on image orders, where our History of Art faculty request images they need for teaching. I also assist faculty on their projects, such as building databases and other online resources.

Things are busier during the academic year. Along with our department technician, we will make sure our HA classrooms are up-to-date and advocate for upgrades. I also present one-shot sessions on visual literacy to various classes throughout the university, showing students how to find and use visual media ethically and efficiently. Because FIT is full of artistic students, I’ll demonstrate strategies to safeguard their own work and answer copyright questions. I’ve also worked on securing publishing rights for images a professor wanted to include in a book she was writing.

Do you have any advice for current students and/or those on the job market?
Volunteer and get a wide variety of experience under your belt. I finished grad school in 2009, which was not exactly the best time to be looking for a job. I was worried I wouldn’t find anything in the art libraries field, so I volunteered at the reference desk of a public library to get additional experience. I had volunteered at the Visual Resources Collections at U of M before I was hired there, and that really helped me land the full-time gig.

I would also say not to discount service industry jobs. I used to be really shy, and waiting tables and working in retail helped me get over that. These kinds of jobs may seem unrelated to library work, but they demonstrate to employers that you can handle conflict and think on your feet.

What were/are some challenges for you as a new art librarian? Are these related to larger challenges in art librarianship?
I think staying on top of technology is always a challenge. As a librarian, I want to be able to recommend the best products and resources for our faculty and students to use. That also ties into a larger challenge faced by our profession: justifying our work to administrators looking to slash budgets. People have asked me, why do we need libraries now when there’s Google? That’s like saying why do we need doctors when there’s WebMD? Google will bring you a million results; a librarian will find you the right one.

Tell us something fun about yourself! What do you do in your spare time?
In my spare time I like to oil paint and play guitar!

Features, Fun

Discovering art through fiction

Written by Anna van Someren on . Leave a comment

I think it’s safe to say that here at ArLiSNAP, we all love art and we all love books. This month I ran into a couple of art/book intersections I found really fascinating. The first is a great post by Scott Indrisek on artsy where 18 artists share books that have inspired them.

This is a fun, kind of back-door way to find artists you might connect with. I found myself clicking through to see the work of artists who like the same books as me. Artist Shara Hughes shares my love for Eckhart Tolle’s mind-bending spiritual book A New Earth, and her collage-like, colorful paintings really appeal to me.

Kevin Wilson’s novel The Family Fang is a book I often put on my staff picks shelf when I worked at a public library. It chronicles the misadventures of a dysfunctional family in which the parents use their children as props in public art performances. Turns out this is one of provocative painter Betty Tompkin’s “favorite novels about art.”

Check out the list: do you see any of your own favorite titles mentioned here?

The second art/book intersection I noticed this month is Sara Baume’s novel A Line Made by Walking. Baume takes the title from Richard Long’s 1967 photograph of the same name, showing, as you might expect, a line he made by walking:

A Line Made by Walking 1967 Richard Long born 1945 Purchased 1976 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P07149

 

But Baume’s use of specific art works is hardly limited to the novel’s title. The book centers on Frankie, a young artist floundering in a disorienting depression. Almost as if she’s planting markers in the ground, Frankie periodically “tests herself”, describing art works related to a particular subject. As she pulls her beloved, late grandmother’s bicycle out of a shed:

Works about Sheds, I test myself: Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. In 1991 the Banbury Army School of Ammunition agreed to blow up a perfectly ordinary garden shed at the artist’s request…

These are real works of art with real historical context, that somehow Baume deftly fits into the life and thoughts of her fictional character. I didn’t immediately recognize the artist Cornelia Parker by name, but the description of Cold Dark Matter reminded me of a work I’d seen at the ICA Boston. A quick Google search surfaced the piece: Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson), which I then read about at length.

Cornelia Parker, Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson), 1999. Charcoal, wire, pins, and nails, 144 × 60 × 72 inches (365.8 × 152.4 × 182.9 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Photo by Charles Mayer Photography. © Cornelia Parker

Baume includes an index of artworks, listed by chapter, at the end of the novel. Many I’ve studied (Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, Tracy Emin’s My Bed), some I’ve seen (Christian Marclay’s The Clock), but most were new to me. This was such a unique way to encounter art; because I was deeply involved with the character and her struggles, I cared about the specific works of art that had affected her and were now helping her find her way. I often stopped to look things up, such as Wolfgang Laib’s Milkstones, which I find indescribably moving. These sculptures many have left me cold, had I discovered them without Baume leading me there.

 

I leave you with this short video showing Laib’s meditative creative process, and a very strong recommendation to read A Line Made by Walking this summer!

 

Features

Allied Media Conference & The Dreamscape Project

Written by Autumn Wetli on . Leave a comment

I’ve been hoping to attend the Allied Media Conference for years, but this summer was finally the time I got to do so! I went to the conference, which takes place annually in Detroit, from June 15-18th. On their website, AMC writes that their aim is to bring “together a diverse community of people using media to incite change.” This brief, open-ended definition allows for the room needed to encapsulate all that AMC has to offer. The arts, media, technology, librarianship, and archives are just a few of the areas that are explored through a lens of social justice work, in the more than 300 hands-on workshops and programs available to attendees. I’ve been particularly interested in attending because of a Radical Archives, Libraries, and Museum programming track that has been occurring for the few past years. I was able to meet and learn from a lot of different professionals in the world of librarianship and museums.

I want to write about one of the workshops I attended, a two part series that took place at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was titled, “The Dreamscape Project: Anti-Racist Pedagogy for Museum Education.” While the creators of the project worked specifically in museum education, I feel that the resources shared easily transfer to the work of art librarians and critical pedagogy. I received permission from the facilitators, Amireh Rezaei-Kamalabad and Alyssa Machida to share the materials they gave us. Also, the first part of the Dreamscape workbook can be read online!

Once we were all at the DIA, Alyssa and Amireh gave us some background and context to The Dreamscape Project. After going through the handout they gave us, everyone went off into the museum to perform two separate exercises. For the first exercise, I partnered with someone who worked at The National Museum of Mexican Art. We discussed issues of “voice” in the museum in the context of our experience as we walked and talked throughout the galleries.

The second exercise had us picking a work of art and designing a lesson plan/activity around it for an educational setting. Below are some of the prompts we were asked to think about when creating our mock activity.

After wandering around for a bit, I chose a painting entitled The Merrymakers, created by Carolus-Duran in 1870. I imagined myself assisting undergrad students with some of their initial research papers. My goal was to get students to think more critically about the work in terms of gender, class, and race by visually analyzing the subject matter and to also think about what was not presented in the painting. I asked my imaginary students to create a brief narrative to the painting. Some of the questions I thought about asking, though it is not an exhaustive list, were: Who are these individuals? What do they do/what are their lives like? Are there any visual markers that indicate their class? If so, how? What was the intended audience of this painting? Think about these questions in terms of gender, class, and race. Who is and is not represented here. Try to think about these issues in historical context, too.

I’m not exactly sure if this would be a successful activity for art history students, but I did really appreciate taking the time to pick apart a painting more critically than I ever normally do. I think as a viewer in a museum, I have tended to take the things I see very much at face value or within whatever context I may have tucked away in my brain from my former days studying art history. This was one of my favorite sessions I attended at AMC because we got actively involved with the work in the museum. I highly suggested anyone attending the conference if it interests them. AMC challenged and humbled me in the best possible way and I keep thinking about it since I left. I can’t wait to attend again!

Features, Fun, Libraries and Collections, Special Collections

A peek inside the art inventory project at the Boston Public Library

Written by Anna van Someren on . 1 Comment

At the Boston Public Library, we’re undertaking an item-level inventory of over 320,000 original art works. That’s a lot of art:

Item by item, we are developing descriptive metadata for each object in the Print Collection using content and vocabulary standards defined by the project. One of the ways we help to preserve the materials is to (carefully!) remove prints from old mats. Here’s a quick look at how we un-mat:

1. Observe the print trapped in its sad old mat.IMG_2152

 

2. Open the window mat and tell the print that you love it and it’s going to be okay.IMG_2153

 

3. With a very sharp knife, carefully cut along the adhesive hinges.IMG_2155

 

4. Set the print free! Well, actually, put it in an acid-free folder and label it. Include any ephemera that may have been lurking beneath.IMG_2157

Advice, Features

Digital Humanities: A Starting Point

Written by Autumn Wetli on . Leave a comment

I’ve recently been reaching out to colleagues for information and advice on learning more about digital humanities(DH) and digital scholarship. It’s a term I’ve heard bandied around a lot at my library, but has never been fully clear to me. I thought I’d share some resources that have been suggested to me, which can hopefully help anyone else who may be grappling with the concept and work of digital scholarship, but would like to know more.

Texts

Web

  • Rebuilding the Porfolio: DH for Art Historians
    In 2014, The Getty Foundation held a two week institute on art history and DH. There are good readings and resources still available on the site. I’ve also found some interesting posts on the Getty’s blog discussing art history in relation to digital scholarship.

  • The Programming Historian
    This website hosts peer-reviewed tutorials on different tools used in DH work. I appreciate the simplicity and easy navigation of the site. Different tutorials are grouped by use under the Lessons link.

  • Miriam Posner’s blog
    Articles by Miriam Posner have been suggested to me multiple times. She is Faculty and the Coordinator for UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program.“How did they make that?” is a great post where she goes through several digital projects and maps out what the project is, the tools that were used, and how to get started using them yourself.

  • Subscribe to the ACRL Digital Humanities email list. The group also runs a blog, which shares readings, events, and opportunities in the digital humanities.

Workshops

  • Digital Humanities Summer Institute
    DHIS is a weeklong institute at the The University of Victoria in Vancouver, Canada. Participants take one course that meets daily.. It is a large conference and they a variety lot of classes, like Fundamentals of Coding for Humanists, Digital Storytelling, and Text Processing to name a few. I have heard from past attendees that DHIS is a valuable chance for networking. There are scholarships available for students and early-career professionals that can help to defray some of the costs.

  • Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching
    Unlike DHIS, HILT is a smaller program with more intensive and rigorous courses. The location changes from year to year. This summer’s HILT will be in Austin, TX. Again, participants choose one class to take during the 5-day institute. Classes offered this year include Programming for Humanists with Python, Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative for Historical Documents, and New Approaches to Literary Archives. HILT also offers scholarships for their program.

  • Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School
    DHOxSS is like DHIS and HILT, except that it is in England. The workshops run for 5 days and while coursework is similar to the other institutes, they also offer an Introduction to Digital Humanities course. This class gives a thorough overview of the field through presentations, talks, and workshops.

Other Resources

  • Library Juice
    Library Juice offers a wide variety of continuing education and professional development courses for librarians. There are a couple classes that are related to the DH. Others touch on areas or skills that are also applicable, such as courses on coding or metadata.

  • If you work at an academic library, check to see if any departments offer programming in the digital humanities. Where I work, the English and History departments often hold lectures and workshops related to digital scholarship. I became interested in DH after taking a workshop on text mining that was primarily aimed at grad students in the Japanese Studies program. I found it useful for understanding what digital projects can look like and discovering digital tools that are out there.

  • There may be DH conferences that happen near you, depending upon where you live.Network Detroitis a conference that happens close to me where people come together to share their work and discuss new advancements in DH.

I’m sure there are a bunch more resources out there that I haven’t mentioned. Please share any ideas, thoughts, etc. in the comments!

News

Northern California Chapter Spring Meeting on May 5th at SFMOMA Library!

Written by Joseph Angelo on . Leave a comment

The ARLIS/NA Northern California Chapter’s Spring meeting will be taking place at the SFMOMA Library in downtown San Francisco on Friday, May 5th.

The tentative schedule is:

  • 10:00-11:00 AM – ARLIS/NA Northern California Chapter business meeting
  • 11:00-11:30 AM – Break and Library tour
  • 11:30 AM-12:30 PM – Forum on Artists’ Ephemera
    • John Held, Jr., mail artist, author, performance artist and former librarian, will talk about Steven Leiber and his influence on the acceptance of artistic ephemera, and Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts at SFMOMA, will discuss curating artists’ ephemera at SFMOMA. Followed by Q&A and open discussion.
  • 12:30-1:30 PM – Lunch on your own
  • 1:30 PM – Explore SFMOMA galleries

Visit https://arlisnanc.blogspot.com/ for details.

Contact Christina Moretta, Chair, or Abby Dansiger, Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, at adansiger@famsf.org with any questions.

Features, Libraries and Collections, Libraries: Art & Design Schools

Art + Feminism + Wikipedia

Written by Anna van Someren on . Leave a comment

In March I was invited to three different Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons! I had a basic idea of what these were about, but I was eager to get involved and find out more. One was held at MIT Libraries, and one at the Institute of Contemporary Art, but I decided to attend the one held at my beloved alma mater, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt). It was hosted by librarians at MassArt, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts and the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences.

As the invitation promised, we were led through basic Wikipedia editing skills by accomplished Wikipedia editor Amanda Rust, the Digital Humanities Librarian and Assistant Director of the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University.

Publish!
Wikipedia editor Eve Kahn on the left, Digital Humanities Librarian Amanda Rust on the right.

After teaching us the basics of Wikipedia editing, Amanda and MassArt librarian Gabrielle Reed talked about the purpose of the project. Gabrielle’s event invitation sums it up well:

Wikimedia’s gender trouble is well-documented. While the reasons for the gender gap are up for debate, the practical effect of this disparity, however, is not. Content is skewed by the lack of female participation. This represents an alarming absence in an increasingly important repository of shared knowledge.

5pillars.jpg
Choosing female artists to represent on Wikipedia.

We were given a list of female artists associated with MassArt who did not yet have a page on Wikipedia, but of course we could also choose any female artist who was not represented. I choose from the list and began doing research on Frances Euphemia Thompson. MassArt librarians helped me find primary research materials on Ms. Thompson. She was an artist and educator, and one of the first African American women to graduate from Massachusetts Normal Art School (the precursor to MassArt).

              

I found some good biographical information on Thompson in this book by Mary Ann Stankiewicz.

          

MassArt librarian Katie Riel at the left, ready to help and/or display our efforts on social media. On the right, MassArt librarian Danielle Sangalang helps me find more information on Ms. Thompson for my very first Wikipedia article, which you can see below and find at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Euphemia_Thompson!

Screen Shot 2017-04-19 at 12.10.20 PM.png

Talking with MassArt librarian Gabrielle Reed, I was happy to find out that this series of edit-a-thons started at ARLIS! It grow out of the ARLIS/NA Women’s SIG, and was led by Sîan Evans together with Michael Mandiberg, Jacqueline Mabey and Laurel Ptak. From small beginnings, it has grown into an international movement, complete with an online guide to help anyone start an event: http://www.artandfeminism.org/organizing-kit/.  As Gabrielle told me, “They make it so easy for us, there’s not excuse not to do it.”  She added, 

“It’s a concrete way to contribute something – the world is so crazy right now, I feel like it’s important to do things that make a difference.” 

I think we all felt the same way, and we had a great time working together, using our voices to add more diversity to Wikipedia.

happyeditors
Happy Wikipedians!
2017 ARLIS/NA Conference New Orleans, Advice: Job Search, ARLIS/NA Conferences, Features

Reflections from a First Time Attendee: 3 highlights from ARLIS/NA 2017

Written by Anna van Someren on . Leave a comment

I’m Anna Van Someren, one of the over 70 first-timers at this year’s ARLIS/NA conference in New Orleans. My path toward art librarianship has been long and loopy. On the way, I’ve passed through art school, advertising, and teaching. While managing digital media projects at MIT, I became interested in library and information studies and decided to get my MLIS from Simmons College, with a concentration in Cultural Heritage Informatics. I’ll graduate this May! Right now I’m working on an arts inventory project at the Boston Public Library and a metadata internship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Dare I specialize – should I even go to ARLIS? (Yes!)

I’ve heard bad things about the job market, and a specialized library job is even harder to find. Maybe I should just hope for a full-time job anywhere! But my dream job is to work as an art librarian. The people I’ve met through my local chapter, ARLIS New England, have been so kind, encouraging and generous with their time. And taking the Art Documentation class taught by the celebrated (and approachable, funny, inspiring) Ann Whiteside whipped my humble wish into a fevered frenzy. Working with art students, finding resources to inspire them!, I thought.  Collaborating with art professors, following their research, finding what they need before they even know it!, I trembled. Purchasing art books! … So I did it. I attended my first ARLIS/NA conference. And I am so glad that I did.

Highlight #1: The ArLiSNAP Career Development Workshop

I’ve been to things like this before – you get someone to glance at your resume, you maybe get an established professional to give you some vague advice while you stare at them, wondering desperately: How do I get to where YOU are? and What comes first, the crazy good haircut or the crazy good job?  But this one was different. It was three hours of creative, engaging, productive fun!

Ashleigh Coren took us through a three-part writing activity that to our pleasure and surprise, resulted in some pretty decent personal statements. Mine still needs some work, but I’m excited to use it on LinkedIn, in interviews, and pretty much everywhere. Then Breanne Crumpton moderated a great Q&A session with a panel of three well-established professionals: Kim Loconto, Kristina Keogh and Heather Slania. Here’s a pdf document summarizing their advice on cover letters, resumes and interviewing in our field. My question was “How do you address a gap in your resume due to staying home a year with your new baby?” The panelists agreed that employers notice such gaps, and suggested mentioning it briefly in the cover letter narrative. They also recommended that parents and caregivers attend the ALPACA meeting later in the day (see my highlight #2 below).

After fielding our questions, the panelists gave us personalized resume advice. We broke into small groups and took turns sharing our resumes and asking questions. This was especially valuable to me, as I’m moving from academia into librarianship; the expectations can really vary in different fields. I feel much more confident about my resume – or I will, as soon as I finish implementing all the new ideas!

  

Highlight #2: Art Librarian Parents and Caregivers SIG (ALPACA)

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this group, but liked the idea of meeting and hearing from other working parents in the field. The ideas generated in the discussion were exciting: research into federal and state family leave laws, for example. I had to leave early for another event, but this meeting had a deep impact on me later in the day.

I was talking with a friend who had also attended the ALPACA meeting. We talked about one of ALPACA’s main concerns: “work life balance”. My friend has a mentor who had once worked with her to unpack this idea of balance – which can sometimes feel like pressure to achieve the impossible. Does successful “balance” mean giving exactly half of your attention to your job and the other half to the rest of your life (your family, personal health, social life, and other activities)? In real life, that would be impossible on almost any given day! This mentor encouraged my friend to think about the effort of balancing one’s life over the long term. For a span of time, work may require more of your attention, and at another time in your life, circumstances may cause a shift in the direction of your energy. I was relieved to realize that maybe balance doesn’t have to mean two equal halves. Maybe we can find balance through flexibility, or in the slow swinging movement of our attention over many years.

Highlight #3: ArLiSNAP meeting

I was excited to attend this meeting. As you know if you’re reading this post, ArLiSNAP stands for Art Library Students and New ARLIS Professionals – and I’m trying to transition from student to professional. Perfect! Like every other ARLIS meeting I’ve attended, the vibe was welcoming and buoyant. I scribbled notes as fast as I could – “the virtual conference is online at the learning portal!” – “check out VRA job digest, VRA FB and twitter!” – “check out ArLiSNAP blog!” – “volunteer to write blog posts!”

  

Of course there were many other highlights in my conference experience, including sessions that gave me an inside look at the work art librarians do. I also had a beautiful walk down Magazine Street, saw a gorgeous sunset over the water, and ate delicious meals with dear friends. Turns out I love New Orleans!

Next year, NYC!