VRA Core RDF Ontology Available for Review

A working group setup through the VRA Core Oversight Committee (Core OC) has released an initial draft of a VRA Core RDF Ontology. The RDF Ontology is based on the Core 4.0 XML Schema and is available along with an XLST stylesheet that will convert VRA Core 4.0 compliant XML in RDF. Representing a VRA Core description in RDF allows for exposing rich VRA Core metadata as Linked Data, so that the descriptions may be widely shared and interact with other Linked Data resources on the Web, such as the ongoing project to release the Getty Vocabularies as linked open data. Together, these tools will allow museums, libraries and archives to increase exposure of their content online, allowing people to more easily find relevant images of cultural heritage objects, sites, and subjects.The Ontology, XSLT conversion stylesheet as well as example records can be found on GitHub at the following link https://github.com/mixterj/VRA-RDF-Project). The Ontology can be viewed here http://purl.org/vra/.Comments and questions are welcomed. Please feel free to submit them over the VRA Core listserv, which you can join at this link http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/vracore.html, on the GitHub repo page or email them directly to Jeff Mixter (mixterj@oclc.org).Working Group members:Jeff Mixter, Software Engineer, OCLCRebecca Guenther, Metadata Specialist at Rebecca Guenther ConsultingTrish Rose-Sandler, Data Analyst, Center for Biodiversity Informatics, Missouri Botanical GardenMichael Dulock, Metadata Librarian, University of Colorado Boulder LibrariesEsme Cowles, Software Engineer, UC San Diego Libraries::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::VRA Core on the WebVRA Core Schemas and Documentation (Library of Congress Official Site)VRA Core Support Pages

Election Results

Dear VRA colleagues,I am pleased to report the outcomes of the recent VRA membership vote, held November 1-30, 2014.Please join me in congratulating and welcoming our incoming Executive Board members, who will take office at the Annual Business Meeting in Denver, March 13, 2015.President-Elect: Jen Green, Plymouth State University Secretary: Jasmine Burns, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Vice President for Conference Program: Chris Strasbaugh, Vanderbilt UniversityOn behalf of the Executive Board I would like to warmly thank all of the candidates for being willing to serve the Association in leadership roles. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the Nominating Committee: Jolene de Verges (Co-Chair), Robb Detlefs, Marcia Focht, Jeannine Keefer (Co-Chair), and Heidi Raatz, with special thanks to Robb Detlefs and Heidi Raatz for serving as election tellers.The following are the results for the votes on the amendments to the VRA Constitution and Bylaws:Amendment to VRA Constitution, Article VII (New): RELATIONS WITH THE VRAF: Passed with a 90% margin Amendment to VRA Bylaws, Article III: NOMINATION AND ELECTION OF OFFICERS: Passed with a 90% margin Amendment to VRA Bylaws, Article V: DUTIES OF OFFICERS: Passed with a 90% margin Affiliation with the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC): Passed with an 89% marginMany thanks to the membership for voting on these important Association matters.Best wishes,Elaine

Mini Survey for 2015 Distinguished Service and Nancy DeLaurer Awards

The VRA Awards Committee seeks your help in identifying this year's nominees and their nominators. We invite you to submit a very brief mini-survey to help us identify potential nominees and nominators: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/awards_comm. Please complete and submit your survey by July 7, 2014.Each year the Visual Resources Association's Awards Committee encourages worthy nominations from the membership for the Distinguished Service Award (DSA) and the Nancy DeLaurier Award (NDL). The DSA honors an individual who has made an outstanding career contribution to the field of visual resources and image management. The NDL, named for one of the pioneers of the visual resources profession, honors either a single individual or a group of visual resources professionals for distinguished achievement in the field. "Achievement" is measured by immediate impact, and may take the form of published work, oral presentation, project management, software development, technology application, web site creation, or other outstanding effort or project.Although nominations for the DSA and the NDL are initiated by Visual Resources Association members, the nominees need not be members of the organization.A nomination dossier should consist of a cover letter from the nominator(s) describing the nature of the achievement, the candidates’ curriculum vitae, and supporting letters and documentation. Electronic nominations via e-mail or a file hosting service such as Dropbox™ are preferred; nomination dossiers are due November 3, 2015. Members of the VRA Awards Committee, upon reviewing submitted dossiers, may recommend one recipient for the Distinguished Service Award and up to two individual recipients or a single group recipient of the Nancy DeLaurier Award in any given cycle.Recommendations are subject to approval by the VRA Executive Board. All nomination dossiers will be retained in the Association Archives.We strongly encourage co-nominators, and the members of the Awards Committee are prepared to offer help and advice. For more information including a list of previous award recipients, please visit the Awards page on the VRA website.

 Thank you for your help in identifying worthy recipients of VRA's distinguished awards. Please consider nominating a worthy colleague for one of these prestigious VRA awards.

All the best,

Margaret WebsterChair, VRA Awards Committee

VREPS Member Profile: Kate Thornhill

Kate Thornhill is the Visual Resource Curator at Lesley University College of Art and Design Library in Boston, a position she calls ideal, a mix of her library and art interests. She earned a BFA and a BA in photography and Art History from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth before attending Simmons for her MLIS. She spent two years as the Senior Digital Assistant at the VRC at UMass Dartmouth, which helped her crystallize her path to a VR career.“My junior year I was playing around with the idea of getting a masters in visual culture studies,” she says. “I saw myself gravitating more towards research instead of focusing on becoming a professional photographer. I am interested in everything, so focusing on one career was really hard for me.” Like many VR professionals, Kate was guided by a mentor, Allison Cywin, Director of the UMass Dartmouth Visual Resource Center. “I met her through the art history program, and when I started asking her what the VRC does, I thought, this is so awesome: It’s art history, photography, and research all in one thing. At the time I had no clue it related to library science and information management.”At the VRC, Kate quickly realized she liked building digital collections and helping people find images. “I thought, how do I turn this into a job? That’s when Allison said I should really look into an MLIS.” Kate completed a rigorous program at Simmons, including coursework in Digital Libraries, Web Development, Digital Stewardship, and Scientific Research Data Management. “Since completing grad school, all my professional interests have dovetailed,” Kate says, though VR management was not covered in her MLIS program, as is often the case. “I think VR gets lumped into digital humanities, digital initiatives, and digital curation studies.” Even though MLIS programs focus on metadata and digital collections creation and management, few programs specifically address how these disciplines are applicable to VR management.We revisited a topic that Jasmine and I had discussed, the MLIS as a companion degree: Deciding on a subject specialty and tailoring MLIS curriculum to that field. Kate hopes to take her targeted education further, with plans to earn a graduate computer science degree. “It would make digital assets management more streamlined and flexible, and help digital preservation practices. It would also open a lot of doors for working with open source programs and developing tools for VR,” because using open source software is often impractical without in-house IT staff to manage it.On a related note, we discussed how tech-savvy VRA members are, and how capable they are with respect to managing digital collections. Kate says, “It makes me wonder how much VR collaborates with ASIS&T and SAA because they do a lot so much with managing/preserving digital collections. I think there should be more collaboration between professional organizations because there are so many special interest groups focusing on DAM,” but many people are intimidated by working with their digital assets. “That’s where professional development should come in,” Kate says. “I’m a strong advocate for continuing professional development and doing research in the library, but it’s hard with limited budgets and finding a balance between work and life,” which is why she thinks professional organization membership is valuable. “I think it’s really important to be actively participating, maybe not necessarily serving on committees, but showing what you are doing and how you are solving problems because there are others trying to figure out the samethings.” Kate described how the VRA listserv helped her recently while working with IRIS. Through the listserv, Kate was able to connect with a Visual Resources Librarian at MIT. “She took time out of her day to sit with me for an hour just to learn some basics about IRIS. It was tremendously helpful!”Kate and the LUCAD library are currently making plans for a big move, relocating across the river to Cambridge. “The new library is going to be transformational for us,” Kate says, but it requires a massive overhaul of the collection, including a weeding project scheduled for summer 2014, and a deaccession project for the slide collection among other projects to be executed this summer. The slide collection currently consists of 50,000-60,000 slides, though 80% of the slide collection is in ARTstor. “Right now my team (2 student workers) and I are focusing on new media, graphic design, and illustration. We’re finding a lot of slides that aren’t in ARTstor but I have to be mindful of how much of the slide collection is kept because of limited space (for slides) in the new library. But, like many VR Curators, my goal for the future isn’t so much to focus on slides.”Kate has the opportunity and challenge to build the program from scratch. “I have a number of projects going on: research and instruction-based, DAM-based, and overall VRC vision- and mission-based.” But, as a relatively new curator, her main goal in her first year is to get to know her community. “I started by revamping the VRC’s digital image research LibGuide: http://research.lesley.edu/artimages. It’s going to be a continuous project (forever evolving) but some areas I’ve focused on building include digital image course specific guides and building a “special topics” in image research page. This is for non-art images because a lot of the questions I get from art students about images are not art based. I’ve also built an ARTstor help guide with some homegrown video tutorials along with a page dedicated to copyright and fair use.” This led us to a discussion about who uses the VRC, and Kate’s answer is that “Faculty, students, and staff do. It’s really great. This semester I have been working one-on-one with an instructor and students for a Fashion and Body Adornment class specifically focused on integrating visual and information literacy into studio art practice. Also, I’ve been addressing the elephants in the room: Google Images and Tumblr.Another project Kate is working on involves the Fenway Libraries Online consortium (a group of small/medium sized academic libraries) and DAM systems. “We are currently working on a Digital Repository Review, not just for VR but for all library and archive digital collections. This is one area I am very excited about because I have a strong interest and developing experience with managing research data and working with institutional repositories. I have a long term goal to start collecting student at LUCAD to deposit into our future IR. It’s going to take a lot of work since ultimately it’s an institutional effort, but I would love to develop arts research data management services for Lesley.”Kate believes that VR managers can be leaders in data management across disciplines. “We create and manage materials for digitization and similar concepts cross over for born-digital content. We understand the workflows for proper digital curation. For my final internship at Simmons, I ran a study at UMass Medical School with their Repository Librarian to assess biomedical PhD student research data needs. Along with this experience, library school, working in a VRC, and getting a degree in photography bells were ringing that research data management doesn’t only have a place in eScience. I see VR experts in tune with the repository management side and teaching data literacy skills. We are the ones who should support the visual arts community and developing their data management needs.”This flexibility and interdisciplinary knowledge base comes from the broad skill set that is required of VR managers. With this in mind, I asked Kate for her advice for students who want to get into VR. “Focusing on digital curation is going to be important, and thinking about how to help faculty and students manage their research or non-research digital collections. And look at the job ads! A lot of the classes I took were based on what jobs wanted, for example, hard skills like XML and XSLT.”And of course there are the internships: “My work experience at UMD, Tufts, Simmons, and UMass Medical School positioned me to have a lot of experience and projects under my belt to start at a job like the one I have now. I pretty much had no life for 2-3 years, haha.” But knowing where she wanted to be, looking at what current VR curators do as well as reading postings for new VR and digital initiatives positions helped her plan a curriculum. “I knew I wanted a job that would be in a field that’s only going to develop more. I think [MLIS education] is what you make of it. That’s the challenge: Knowing where you want to be.”Kate will be attending SEI this summer, so be sure to say hello!

VREPS Second Member Profile

Our second VREPS member profile is Milwaukee-based Jasmine Burns. She has been helping with the local plans for VRA 32 and will be working the registration desk whenever she can. She will also be moderating the VREPS-organized Session 4, “The Teaching Turn: From Static Collections to Dynamic Learning Centers,” on Thursday, March 13, at 10:35 (sponsored by Scholars Resource).Jasmine earned her MA in Art History from SUNY Binghamton while also serving as the Assistant Curator of Visual Resources there. She was a graduate student assistant for Marcia Focht (the VR Curator), who mentored Jasmine and gave her a lot of freedom and responsibility. She had the opportunity to work on major cataloging and digitization projects, including scanning and cataloging a slide collection of medieval images, which was particularly interesting as her academic focus was medieval art. As Jasmine began working on her MA thesis, she says that her research “veered away from looking at objects in their original cultural contexts and moved towards looking at them in their current archival and digital states.” During that time, she also received a Kress Foundation Travel Fellowship to attend the College Art Association’s THATCamp, a Pre-Conference Forum on Digital Art History. Things all came together in her thesis, “Digital Facsimiles and the Modern Viewer: Medieval Manuscripts and Archival Practice in the Age of New Media.”“I really got to dive into issues of access, preservation, and theories of materiality,” she says, which led her to apply to MLIS programs for archives. She is currently enrolled at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Archives/Archival Administration program. Although she was already qualified for VR jobs with an MA and her experience at Binghamton’s VRC, Jasmine says that fellow VRA members advised her to pursue the MLIS. “At the conference in Providence, I kept hearing people say get a library degree!” We discussed the MLIS as a companion degree for those who want to specialize in a narrower information management field, such as Visual Resources.Because she already has the art history background as well as hands-on experience, she can focus her coursework to better prepare her for a VR career. She specifically chose courses in electronic records management, digital libraries, preserving information media, and academic libraries, as well as a fieldwork course to gain more experience. She was just hired for an internship with the Digital Collections at the UWM library, where she will be working on a joint project with the American Geographical Society, digitizing and cataloging some of their materials for the online collection. “The AGS gets a lot of public inquiries,” she says, “so they are working to make their materials available online. I will be working with one other intern over the next year to scan a variety of materials, mostly manuscripts and written documents.”I asked Jasmine to talk a little more about her work at Binghamton. In addition to the VRC, she interned with the University Art Museum. “I worked with the director on a preservation project to take works on paper out of their frames and store them properly.” The director was new and taking the opportunity to reorganize, which include this four-month project to disassemble framed works on paper, most of which had been framed in the 1960s and were no longer housed in archivally-sound enclosures. Jasmine told me that the catalog for these items was handwritten in index cards, but that the museum was not yet ready to create an electronic catalog; however, the rehousing project helped gain more intellectual control over the materials. “I left it all ready to go!” she says.I switched gears a bit and asked Jasmine one of my Big Questions: What are her thoughts on how the profession will change (or need to change) in the next five years, especially given how much it has changed already? “I think the focus on digital imaging is going to continue to be a big deal. We are seeing more and more that these responsibilities are being merged with the already cumbersome load on VR curators.” She also believes that we need to be mindful of the long-term effects of digitization and digital preservation. “These issues are obviously being addressed in the literature, but how much are we actually applying in our everyday work? It will happen one day that we try to access an image, and the file format just does not exist anymore!” VRA focuses heavily on digital asset management, which we both agree will be absolutely necessary for successful VR management. Jasmine noted that, appropriately, most, if not all, of the VRA conference sessions have something to do with technology.On a related note, I asked her what kind of advice she has for current students and recent graduates. Jasmine is in a bit of a unique position as someone who has worked as a VR curator but is also a student. “What I see happening already, just from job searching, is that traditional VR curation is only a small portion of the job. Job postings call for someone with multiple degrees, and, more and more, specifically an MLIS.” She also notes that and there are so many job titles that encompass essentially the same position, such as project archivist, VR curator, digital collections librarian, and even art information professional. “It makes us seem like we are part of IT,” she jokes.But mostly, she advises students and recent graduates to get hands-on experience. “I never would have gotten this internship [with UWM Digital Collections] if I did not already know how to use the equipment. Plus there is only so much that you can learn in a classroom.” For example, her graduate assistantship with Marcia Focht at Binghamton led her directly to where she is now. Marcia, who at the time was the VRA secretary, encouraged Jasmine to attend the conference in Providence last year and to get involved with the community. “I am so happy I did,” says Jasmine. “Everyone is so nice, and they are genuinely interested in you and want to give you advice.”“I think it is definitely a niche field,” she continues, “And it might seem difficult to enter at first, and the amount of education required might be overwhelming, but just from attending the VRA conference and participating in the listerv, I realized that this is the community to which I belong.”   

VRA Core Website Receives a 4.5 out of 5 Rating from the Technical Services Quarterly

In a "Tech Services on the Web" review from the December 2013 issue of Technical Services Quarterly the VRA Core website received a rating of 4.5 out of 5.  The review praised the website for providing "a veritable treasure trove of implementation examples, presentations, and other important information for those thinking of using or who have already implemented VRA."Eustis, J. (2013). Tech Services on the Web: Visual Resources Association's VRA Core; Eustis, J. (2013). Tech Services on the Web: Visual Resources Association's VRA Core; http://www.loc.gov/standards/VRAcore. Technical Services Quarterly, 30(4), 441-442.. Technical Services Quarterly, 30(4), 441-442.::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::VRA Core on the WebVRA Core Schemas and Documentation (Library of Congress Official Site)VRA Core Support Pages

Travel Award Application - 2014 Conference in Milwaukee, WI

APPLY HEREThe Visual Resources Association offers several awards to assist member attendance at the VRA Annual Conference. Several Tansey Awards are offered each year along with Corporate Travel Awards, New Horizon awards, named individual donor awards, Top-Up awards and student awards. (Please see Types of Awards and announcements on VRA-L for more information.) Selection of recipients is determined by the Travel Awards Committee. The goal of the Travel Awards Program is to encourage and support conference attendance by both new members/conference attendees and veteran members/attendees.The Tansey Travel Award program was started in 1993 with initial funding by Luraine Tansey. She won the Distinguished Service Award that year and requested that her travel expenses reimbursement be used to assist other VRA members with their professional development.  This became the seed of the fund, further supplemented when she sent in her first retirement checks (one from teaching art history, and another much smaller one from slide librarianship).  The total was matched by the VRA and the Tansey Travel Award Fund was born.  The Travel Award Committee, formed in 1993, presented the first five awards of $400 each to VRA attendees of the 1994 New York City conference.The Tansey awards are now funded through fundraising events, VRA member donations, and other VRA funds.  Full Tansey awards are now up to $850 each; in addition there are Top-Up awards available up to $599 intended for applicants who have partial institutional funding, and awards for International members of $1,000.  There are several corporate sponsors who have funded awards in the past (2013 sponsors were Archivision, Davis Art Images, Gallery Systems, and Saskia, Ltd.).  The Travel Awards Committee is very grateful to all of these sponsors.  For 2013, two anonymously donated New Horizons awards of $850 and a New Horizons student award of $300 were awarded.  In addition, several individual VRA members have sponsored named awards, for example the Kathe Hicks Albrecht Award and the Joseph C. Taormina Memorial Award.The Travel Awards Committee especially encourages applications from new members/first time conference attendees, veteran members who have not had funds to attend conferences, international members, solo, isolated, and part-time VR professionals, students considering careers in visual resources, and any member actively participating in the conference who lacks sufficient funding to attend.Travel Award Recipients Since the Founding of the ProgramTravel Award InformationTravel Award Rules, Guidelines, and TipsAwards Committee