Category Archives: Student Organizations

ArLiSNAP/VREPS Virtual Conference 2021

light blue and purple conference banner

(updated 11/01/21)

Art Library Students and New ARLIS/NA Professionals (ArLiSNAP) and Visual Resources Association’s Emerging Professionals And Students Group (VREPS) invite you to save the date for our 2021 Fall Virtual Conference.

This conference is open to all, but focuses on the needs of students and new professionals. Attendees interested in art librarianship or visual resource management will have the opportunity to learn from peers and celebrate each other’s work through virtual posters and presentations. Via this conference, we’re seeking to foster a sense of belonging and growth in our community, and we invite all interested students and new professionals to participate.

The virtual conference will take place on Saturday, November 13th. The full program and registration information will be released on the ArLiSNAP blog and VREPS blog. To stay up-to-date, subscribe to the ArLiSNAP listserv, follow ArLiSNAP on Twitter / Instagram, and check the VREPS blog.

SCHEDULE

1:00 pm ET | 10 am PT – Welcome!

1:10 pm ET | 10:10 am PT – Fresh Eyes Lighting Talks

2:00 pm ET | 11:00 am PT – Skill Shares

  • If you would like to weave along during our Beginner Weaving Skill Share, bring a book or empty picture frame, a few large binder clips or tape, and any ball of yarn.

2:20 pm ET | 11:20 am PT – Break 

2:30 pm ET | 11:30 am PT – Poster Q&A + Social 

3:30 pm ET |12:30 pm PT – The End!

REGISTER NOW!

Please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpfu-oqzojGdHnnXsq6bJ7tj2-j7jMTp2P

You will receive a link to join via Zoom when you register. If you have any questions, please send an email to arlisnap.na@gmail.com

TIMELINE

  • Wednesday, 10/20: Deadline for all calls
    Please submit a form for each session category in which you are interested.
  • Friday10/22: All applicants will be informed of the conference team’s decision for each submission
  • Friday10/29: Deadline for selected submissions to accept participation in the conference
  • Week of 11/08: Technology Check Session
  • Tuesday, 11/09: Deadline for materials (virtual posters and presentation slides)
  • Saturday, 11/13: Conference date

SUBMISSION FORM

Our calls for students and new professionals to present in different sessions are outlined below. If you have any questions in the meantime, please send an email to ArLiSNAP: arlisnap.na@gmail.com.

You are welcome to submit for more than one of the categories below. Please submit a form for each session category in which you are interested.
https://forms.gle/KaLhwP1c6htRNm1SA

CALL FOR VIRTUAL POSTER PRESENTATIONS

ArLiSNAP and VREPS welcome proposals from students and new professionals with an interest in art librarianship or visual resources management to share newly completed or in-progress projects, be they research or outcomes from an internship/practicum, at the virtual poster presentation at our 2021 Virtual Conference. This is an opportunity for emerging professionals to share their work in a supportive and engaging space while connecting with other students and early career information professionals. Proposals are open to individual presenters and co-presenters. Virtual posters will be available for asynchronous browsing by attendees, with a live Q&A for all presenters during the conference followed by a social hour. Formatting details will be sent if selected.

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

Fresh Eyes: Celebrating Our Successes as New Professionals

Are you a student or emerging professional who solved a problem for your school or institution? Did you complete a huge project during an internship, suggest a new workflow that helped speed up digitization or researcher requests, or start an amazing new program for community members? We want to hear from you! 

Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to bring “fresh eyes” to an institution. These “fresh eyes” can often add valuable perspectives, allowing for opportunities to ask questions, make suggestions, and create new approaches to work that’s been done “the way we’ve always done it.” In the session, speakers will present via lightning talks case studies detailing how they experienced a workflow or problem, and how their suggestions and perspectives as students and emerging professionals helped create a better process or environment. This is a space for us to celebrate the valuable contributions students and emerging professionals can bring to an institution. 

This session will feature virtual lightning talks of five to seven minutes from five to six presenters, followed by live Q&A. 

Building Belonging

ArLiSNAP and VREPS invites you to share current initiatives in the field of art information focusing on fostering a sense of belonging. Proposals can encompass ongoing, completed or in-progress projects that aim to reshape our art information spaces physically or virtually, for you, your colleagues, or patrons. This prompt is purposefully open-ended to encourage a variety of lenses on how we can rethink and reshape our field. Presentations from students and new professionals can be solo or collaborative. 

This session will feature three 15-minute virtual presentations with a live Q&A. Please note we will confer with selected presenters if they wish to be recorded or not. 

CALL FOR SKILL SHARE MINI WORKSHOPS

We are committed to learning and a community that extends beyond our scheduled sessions and agenda. Do you have something you’re currently working on, passionate about, recently discovered, or a practice you find helpful or restorative? During our breaks between sessions, we are looking for volunteers to share their passions and skills with us. Some ideas include a guided breathing exercise, new pandemic hobby, self-care strategy, or in-progress project. These skill shares are meant to be casual and offer space to learn and share what we’re learning with each other.  

We will have two breaks during which we want to highlight your knowledge, skills, and interests. If you would like to participate in our Skill Share, please tell us a little bit about what you would like to do and approximately how long you think it would take (3-10 minutes). 

What’s up on your campus?

Does your MLIS program host a student interest group related to art librarianship? Or, perhaps your Special Libraries Association student chapter attracts the art library-curious? If so, ArLiSNAP wants to know! Leave a comment or get in touch with Ashley Peterson, ArLiSNAP Student Liaison at aepeterson [at] gmail [dot] com.

We are interested in keeping in touch with art library student interest groups across North America so that we can share information with you and help you promote activities, projects, or events you’d like to share with the wider art library community. You can keep up with us via:

  • this here blog
  • Facebook (ArLiSNAP)
  • Twitter (@arlisnap)
  • LinkedIn
  • our weekly newsletter

And, if you would like to get more involved with our group, we are always happy to recruit new volunteers to keep our activities running smoothly – have a look at the ways you can help out as an ArLiSNAP Liaison here.

Interested in seeing what other student groups are up to? Check out Western University’s Facebook group, or the Society of Art Librarianship Students at Indiana University’s Facebook group!

What's up on your campus?

Does your MLIS program host a student interest group related to art librarianship? Or, perhaps your Special Libraries Association student chapter attracts the art library-curious? If so, ArLiSNAP wants to know! Leave a comment or get in touch with Ashley Peterson, ArLiSNAP Student Liaison at aepeterson [at] gmail [dot] com.

We are interested in keeping in touch with art library student interest groups across North America so that we can share information with you and help you promote activities, projects, or events you’d like to share with the wider art library community. You can keep up with us via:

  • this here blog
  • Facebook (ArLiSNAP)
  • Twitter (@arlisnap)
  • LinkedIn
  • our weekly newsletter

And, if you would like to get more involved with our group, we are always happy to recruit new volunteers to keep our activities running smoothly – have a look at the ways you can help out as an ArLiSNAP Liaison here.

Interested in seeing what other student groups are up to? Check out Western University’s Facebook group, or the Society of Art Librarianship Students at Indiana University’s Facebook group!

Interview: Starting a Student Chapter

We’ve talked before about the value of having professional-association student chapters on campus, whether it’s just general awareness of career options and extracurriculars or the impact on your resume of helping to manage and plan events, fundraisers, field trips, etc. There are no ARLIS/NA student chapters (yet), but that doesn’t mean you can’t start one! (I guess ArLiSNAP is sort of your virtual student chapter.)

During my MLIS these past two years, I watched some fellow McGill students start up a student chapter of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. As media preservation is a pretty important topic to arts-librarianship students, I thought I would ask a few questions about the process, the need, and the benefits of bringing special-interest representation to your school. Justin Mckinney kindly agreed to answer my questions about his work founding the chapter.

(Photos by Fiona Mak.)

Film handling workshop with George Eastman House

Film handling workshop with George Eastman House

George Eastman Film Handling Workshop

George Eastman Film Handling Workshop

ArLiSNAP: Let’s start with student chapters generally – were you members of other student chapters to start?

Justin Mckinney: During my first year of library school, I was a member of the Association of Canadian Archivists student chapter at McGill. I started out keen and not knowing what I was doing and imagining all the great things we would accomplish, but nothing really happened all year and I wasn’t exactly as active as I could have been.

ArLiSNAP: What’s the value of having local representation of professional associations?

JM: I think it has the potential to help raise awareness about the organization. Also, it can educate student members about issues in the field and maybe even lead to practical opportunities to do stuff. I think it probably varies from year to year and association to association, and is really dependent on the group of people involved at any given time.

ArLiSNAP: Why the Association of Moving Image Archivists specifically?

JM: I became really interested in film history and film preservation after my undergrad, which led me down the path to library school. I was already an AMIA member before starting library school, and my main interest in the archivy/LIS world was and is film preservation. After a sort of underwhelming experience of my first year at library school (which included a complete absence of film archiving content), I was determined to take more of an active role in my own learning. Fortunately, I had a couple of great friends in the program who had similar interests and were very supportive, and it snowballed from there.

ArLiSNAP: What was the process for starting a student chapter?

JM: I started emailing (and harassing) the fine people at AMIA about how to start a student chapter and they explained what was needed, which was mainly a constitution and that the executive members all be members of AMIA. They put me in touch with the folks at the NYU AMIA student chapter, and they were kind enough to send me their constitution, which I basically amended to change any mention of NYU to McGill — from there, we were off and running.

As for McGill, I just emailed people at the School of Information Studies (SIS) and let them know what I was doing and they got us a table at the student chapter fair at the start of the school year. Throughout the year they were generally helpful about any questions I had and they also helped us get connected with the Masters of Library and Information Science Student Association (MLISSA), and the Post-Graduate Student Society (PGSS), which both provide funding for SIS student groups.

In general, though, it was mostly a lot of me emailing and badgering people and then getting information as needed. It’s not really a clear process to setting up a chapter, and I think it would be beneficial if there were more guidance or upfront information given about the process of starting one.

In regards to gauging student interest, we really had no idea what would happen. To start it was just the executive (myself, Mark Haydn as vice-president, and Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen as secretary and treasurer). My main goal was to make the student chapter viable enough for someone to take over for a second year, once we all graduated. At the aforementioned student chapter fair, we were pleasantly surprised to get over 20 students to sign up for our email list, and we held our first meeting, which had over ten people, including first- and second-year students. This was a pleasant surprise and I think demonstrated that many people are interested in the field and also frustrated with the lack of film/media archiving content in library school.

The main paperwork was getting the constitution ratified. We also had to apply for funding for various events through PGSS and MLISSA. A lot it was just learning on the fly, as none of us had ever done anything like this before. So it involved a lot of asking questions of people at McGill and AMIA, and remaining persistent.

Probably the biggest challenge was forging a relationship with the Moving Image Research Laboratory (MIRL) at McGill, a research project which houses a wonderful cinema space and collection of 16mm films. Pretty much all of the Fall 2013 semester was spent sending emails, stalking professors, and showing up unannounced, just trying to get our foot in the door. Finally in January, we got access and that proved to be our greatest success, as it allowed us to start handling film, cataloguing the collection, and providing real hands-on experience in the field.

ArLiSNAP: You also organized a one-day symposium, which brought in guest speakers and gave students a chance to present their research. Why did you choose a symposium as your first event? How did that organizational process work?

JM: Technically, our first event was a field trip to the National Preservation Centre at Library and Archives Canada in Gatineau. We had 20 people come along and we got a great tour of the facilities there, and met a bunch of professionals in the field. Mark Haydn and I also attended the AMIA Conference in 2013 and met a bunch of the students at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY. Thanks to these friendships, we were able to organize a trip down there as well, where we got to tour their facilities and participate in a film-handling workshop.

As for the symposium, I heard that all the other groups were doing one, so we just copied them. The process of organizing it wasn’t that difficult. We booked the space at SIS and just sent out a call for papers and presentations to members of our email list. I also contacted David Stevenson, the conservator at the Canadian Centre of Architecture, whom I met on a class field trip, about presenting. I also contacted Phil Spurrell, the proprietor of CineClub Film Society, who I’ve known for several years and volunteered with. He is very knowledgeable about the medium of film and had a lot of interesting experiences working with film.

ArLiSNAP: Have you found someone to hand off the reins to? Do you have any thoughts on the sustainability of the group, long-term?

JM: One of the really encouraging things about our membership was that we had a lot of first-year students who were incredibly eager and motivated. So by the time we started cataloguing the MIRL collection, we were regularly getting 15 to 20 people out to volunteer. So we knew we had a solid base of people who might be able to take over next year. From there, we asked for nominations and were able to come up with a four-person executive committee for another year.

My hope is that some of the connections we made with the folks at LAC, and the folks at Eastman House, will continue and allow for more educational opportunities and networking. Also, the MIRL collection is really outstanding and needs a lot of work to catalogue, plus the cinema space allows for screenings and projections of the collection. This hands-on practical experience is invaluable and I think should be a major factor in the success of the group long-term.

ArLiSNAP: Do you have any ideas or recommendations about how to improve LIS curricula to contain more of the useful things your AMIA chapter is trying to do? Or do you think it’s better off as extracurricular activity?

JM: I feel like the major deficit of the MLIS program is the lack of hands-on experience of working with materials regardless of type. Particularly in the archival end of things, where the theoretical felt very abstract and weird to me. I found my understanding only started to come together through some of the volunteering I was doing at the Jewish Public Library Archives, where I was handling documents, creating finding aids, and writing accession numbers on folders.

Obviously, because of the broad focus of the program, it would be hard to have a dedicated film archiving course, but it is certainly something that could be touched on. Maybe a course dealing directly with the preservation of objects, rather than the theoretical preservation of objects would be useful.

Unfortunately, I think everything is becoming so focused on digital objects and becoming “information specialists” to the detriment of acquiring actual tangible physical skills, which I fear is leaving a lot of graduates ill-equipped to manage the physical aspects of library and archive work. Maybe it’s for the better, as having a broader and more transferable set of skills could help grads deal with the job market, but I can’t help thinking something valuable is being lost in the transition.

AMIA Montreal Meets AMIA Rochester

AMIA Montreal Meets AMIA Rochester in New York

We’d love to hear about your experiences with professional associations, and if you’re thinking about starting a student chapter at your school (ARLIS/NA or otherwise). It’s not too late to plan something for the coming school year. Let us know in the comments!

Student Groups for a New School Year

Hello ArLiSNAPpers! I’m sure many of you, like me, are just settling in to a new school year, and that means it’s time to start thinking about student groups. At my school, we’re having our first informational meeting about forming student groups on Friday.

Part of my role as your Student Group Liaison is to update a list of all the student groups out there so that we can more effectively distribute information about ArLiS, highlight successes, and address some of our collective challenges. If your school has an ArLiS student chapter, please feel free to get in touch with me (my contact info is over to your right).

If you don’t have a student chapter and are interested in starting one, or if you lead a non-ArLiS student group (e.g. SLA, ALA, SAA) and some of your members are interested in art librarianship, we would also love to hear from you! As someone in a program with no art librarianship focus, I’m particularly interested in how student groups can create support and opportunities that may not be built into the program.

How many of you are in programs where there’s an ArLiS student chapter? A group that isn’t affiliated with ArLiS, but focuses on art librarianship? A program with no related groups?

[polldaddy poll=7388270]

Thanks, and we look forward to hearing what you all are up to!

SLA@Pratt annual Skill Share Fair

SLA@Pratt annual Skill Share Fair is coming up!

This year, the Fair will take place on Friday, April 15th from 4-6pm on the 6th floor of the Pratt Manhattan Center.

The Fair will consist of panel discussion from varying realms of the SLA universe, as well as one-on-one speed mentoring sessions by working professionals spanning the spectrum of the special libraries field.

Attendees that are not Pratt students or affiliates must RSVP with Aurelia, amoser@pratt.edu, to be cleared with security prior to admittance to the event.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact any SLA@Pratt officer here: http://mysite.pratt.edu/~sla/officers.html.

SLA@Pratt annual Skill Share Fair
Friday, April 15th from 4-6pm
PMC, 144 West 14th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues)
in Manhattan, NYC

(h/t Antonio DeRosa, SLA@Pratt, VP of PR)

AMLISS Artist Books Event

UNC Chapel Hill’s Art and Museum Library and Information Student Society (AMLISS) is sponsoring a “rad book reading for artists’ books.  It will be like a book reading, except with visuals of the artists’ books accompanying the reading.  I’m not sure if anything like this has been done before, so you should all come and make artists’ book reading history. Or just to visit the neat Sloane Art Library.” – David Parisi, AMLISS President

The event happens Tuesday September 14.
6:15 – reception
7pm – book reading

Check out the flyer below.

AMLISS Artist Books Flyer

AMLISS Meeting

Friends over at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Art & Museum Library & Information Student Society (AMLISS) will be kicking off the new semester with a meeting on August 31st at 7 p.m.  Check them out.

Their listserv indicates that it is in room 301.  I’m guessing that’s 301 here…

School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
216 Lenoir Drive • CB #3360 • 100 Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
(919) 962-8366 • Fax: (919) 962-8071 • info@ils.unc.edu

Have questions? Contact David Parisi, President; Frances McVay, Vice-President; Tessa Cierny, Treasurer; Shay Beezley, Secretary; or John Cowhig, Webmaster.

UNC Directory