VRA Conference Minneapolis 2024

FREE — No registration required!

Stretch your legs and join your fellow conferees in a visit to Minneapolis' Target Field, home of the Minnesota Twins. The ballpark environs feature numerous examples of public sculpture and mosaics (not all of them sports related!). On the way back to the Embassy Suites, view the oversize mural tribute to Minnesota music legend Bob Dylan. Allan Kohl will be your guide and raconteur. No need to sign up in advance — just meet in the hotel lobby outside the Emerald Bar (opposite the reception desk).

What does a library or archive do when over 250 disaffiliating United Methodist Church (UMC) representatives arrive at the door with all their records? When faced with this question in 2023, Pitts Theology Library staff acted swiftly and decisively to ensure that these records would represent more than a difficult moment in the UMC tradition by contributing to a project much larger in scope and scale that will benefit people across the state. Fortuitously, the influx of records from former UMC churches coincided with a digital humanities project led by Pitts, the Historic Rural Church Archive. The goal of the project is to support researchers, genealogists, and churchgoers exploring the histories of rural communities through the focal point of local churches across Georgia. Our panel will discuss the workflows involved in managing an unexpected and rapid accession of church collections, including accessioning, processing, and description. We will also discuss the new procedures we developed to expand engagement with the materials through the HRC Archive, including plans for community contributions, outreach activities, scanning days at local libraries, and more.

This panel is a case study on collaborative archiving and digital humanities practices with lessons learned about managing expectations, community-submitted records, holistic workflows, and external partnerships. Attendees can expect to learn just how messy an unexpected, large-scale acquisition can be but also see the potential of digital projects for making the best of archival materials for a wide audience.

WORKSHOP FULL!

LIMITED TO 15 PARTICIPANTS
PRIOR REGISTRATION REQUIRED

The cost of this workshop is included in your conference registration, but participants must register for the workshop when they register for the conference. 

This workshop will introduce participants to the basic workflow for creating a digital map and integrating it into programming and exhibitions. The workshop’s goal is for participants to leave with 1) an idea of whether a digital map might be useful for their institution, 2) practical information about what is entailed in creating a map, and 3) resources for more information on this subject.

Digital cartography presents an opportunity for visual resources professionals from universities, libraries, and museums to collaborate across disciplines, engage students and the general public, and introduce collections to a broad range of audiences. This workshop will present digital mapping as an opportunity for visual resources professionals to visualize image collections, deepen user engagement and discovery, and serve as a research tool.

In the first part of this 1.5 hour session, workshop participants will discuss the possibilities and challenges inherent to each through a series of case studies of image-forward digital maps created for use in museum and classroom settings. We will touch on metadata acquisition and cleaning, image repositories, design, and integration into GLAM exhibitions and websites. The instructor with then present both open-source and subscription platforms for digital mapping including ArcGIS Online and Mapbox.

The second half of the workshop will consist of a hands-on guided tutorial that uses pre-formatted data to gives participants the experience of navigating the platforms and curating the data to suit their particular needs. Digital cartography has the potential to foreground image collections in new and exciting ways and to allow users to explore holdings from a distance.

Spiraling costs, limited time, complicated migrations, and user needs have led many institutions to find ways to connect disparate data repositories together for discovery, preservation, and more. Whether breaking out of multiple digital systems siloed at one institution or bringing together multiple institutions into a shared system, harnessing data from a variety of repositories requires a lot of decision-making. What are the common metadata fields and which are most important to users? What data types are available and which are most easily ingested for a common system? Are there tasks repositories share or are their multiple tasks, each important to a different constituency? With multiple players, the decision making must be collective and the maintenance will be ongoing. Our presenters will talk about these challenges and the need for high-level governance to start multi-stakeholder collaborative projects and keep them going.

Refuel and connect with colleagues in between sessions!

Beverages: regular and decaf coffee, tea, assorted sodas
Snacks: assorted Kind bars, fresh whole fruit

This event is sponsored by Ex Libris, Part of Clarivate

This hour is for a friendly, informal discussion about the use of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in GLAMR spaces. Does your institution use IIIF? Have you worked on a project or built a neat tool with IIIF? Would you just like to know what IIIF is and what it does? Join us for some casual IIIF chit-chat. No "formal" presentations, just relaxed question asking and knowledge sharing! 

This SIG is sponsored by vrcHost

Visual Resources in the era of Virtual Reality: a Framework for Digital Primary Source Literacy
Colleen Hoelscher

Museums, libraries, and archives are ever-increasingly creating digitized versions of primary source documents from their holdings, making visual resources findable and usable by researchers around the world. These resources are a boon for those teaching in the humanities as they allow students to conduct primary source research beyond the confines of their university library and highly curated published primary source collections. In addition, the shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased use of and comfort with digital archival sources, including visual resources. Even as digital primary sources become more available, the process of critically evaluating them has become more daunting: “deep fakes,” deceptive editing via Photoshop or other means, AI creations, filters, misleading metadata, and curatorial bias can all deceive students. This paper will provide guidance to librarians, educators, and other cultural heritage professionals who engage in teaching digital primary source literacy. Drawing on the SAA/ACRL Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, it proposes a framework of key competencies displayed by the digital literate working with online archival sources: the ability to locate and access digital primary sources, critically evaluate digital sources for authenticity and bias, and correctly cite digital primary sources.

The Human Touch: Copyright Protections for Works Created by Deities, Creatures, and Machines
Kiowa Hammons

The 2014 Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" [1]. But can copyright law so easily discount creative content such as Monkey selfies, elephant oil paintings, songs written by religious deities, or pastoral landscape paintings by artificial intelligence? Particularly with the recent abundance of infringement cases regarding AI generated materials, how are the courts and we as users of AI systems (and owners of pets) come to terms with the value of non-human intellectual property?

Evaluating Digital Collections for Accessibility
Nora Davies

A presentation discussing methods for evaluating digital collections for accessibility. Begins with a breakdown of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Universal design and ends with tips for evaluating digital collections and some examples of accessible collections. Attendees will learn the current standards for web accessibility and how to apply that to their own institutional collections or evaluate existing collections. This is especially relevant to attendees working with visual resources online who are interested in broadening the access of their collections.

Register for this tour (separate from conference registration)

Limited to 30 people — Free
Tour participants are responsible for transportation to and from the location.
Address: 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55345

PRIOR REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Join Hennepin County Library Special Collections for a department tour at Minneapolis Central Library. The department manages the library’s archives and digitization program, with over 500 archival collections and a quarter-million digital items. Our digital collections are among the largest digital repositories in the state and are particularly rich in visual resources: Photographs, maps, posters, postcards, video recordings, restaurant menus, cartoons, school yearbooks, and property records. Attendees will tour the department workroom and archives, as well as our public service areas. The tour will cover equipment, technologies, user platforms, staffing and funding, material types, preservation measures, and usage patterns.

The tour will take place on the 4th floor of the Minneapolis Central Library and will take approximately 1 hour.

Visual resources curators, librarians, and archivists play a pivotal role as stewards of invaluable digital collections within academic and cultural institutions worldwide. However, they encounter significant challenges in enhancing the impact of these collections, particularly when it comes to scale and discoverability. Since the launch of Artstor’s Shared Shelf in 2011, now called JSTOR Forum, ITHAKA has been meeting cataloging needs for the visual resources community. In 2020, we embarked on the Open Community Collections initiative, a groundbreaking charter program designed to explore the effectiveness of sharing JSTOR and Portico infrastructure with institutions for the discovery, use, and preservation of their digital collections. Through this initiative, we partnered with over 300 institutions, extending our participation and offerings to address a broader range of audiences and needs. In the process, our core VR audience have found novel ways to engage with Forum and new services, establishing themselves as invaluable collaborators both within and across institutions and departments.departments. Join us in this session as we delve into the insights and achievements gleaned from our collaboration with partner institutions. Discover how VRA members have leveraged their participation to expand the reach of their collections, fulfill the needs of their broader institutions, and foster collaboration with diverse groups, both internally and externally.

In this session representatives from Minnesota-based visual collections will provide an overview of the collections they work with that are unique to the area and give attendees a window into the projects they are undertaking to make these local collections accessible to their community and beyond.

Heather Shirey, Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas and Co-Director of Urban Art Mapping, and Rita Morgan, MA student in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of St. Thomas and Research Assistant for Urban Art Mapping, will share how their interdisciplinary research team documents and analyzes street art that is often ephemeral and fleeting. Their George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art archive seeks to document street art from around the world created in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality.

Rita Walaszek Arndt, Program and Outreach Manager for Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), will speak about her experience providing access to MNHS’s Native American collections and co-curating the current exhibits “Our Home: Native Minnesota” and “Reframing Our Stories.” The latter exhibit features archival photos of Native community members taken by Twin Cities photojournalists from the 1950s through the 1980s, now presented with context provided by community they depict.

Rebecca Gillette, Associate Director and Community Engagement Lead for Mapping Prejudice, will share how the Mapping Prejudice project works to identify and map racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. From their base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, their interdisciplinary team collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism and support the work of reparations.

Molly Huber, Outreach Coordinator for the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL), will talk about how MDL supports discovery and education through access to unique digital collections shared by cultural heritage organizations from across the state of Minnesota. MDL maintains a robust digital storytelling program, interpreting and packaging the materials in the aggregated collection through different lenses and formats to provide a multitude of entry points. MDL also expands access and digital capacity through the Scan for Keeps program, loaning digitization kits at no cost for community scanning events or internal archiving work.

Grab a drink and connect with colleagues in between sessions!

Beverages: regular and decaf coffee, tea, assorted sodas

Each year our association has many members who are attending their first or second conference. Even with user-friendly conference programs a newcomer may have questions or need advice. The Annual Conference Mentor Program matches a seasoned conference-attendee (mentor) with such a first-timer. This is a fun and collegial program that has had much success and positive feedback. Both mentors and mentees have found the program greatly enhances their conference experience.

You may request a conference mentor or volunteer as a mentor when you register for the conference, or contact the Membership Committee’s Mentor Coordinator.

Between Images and Words
As this year's keynote speaker, author Kao Kalia Yang will read from and explore how the form of the picture book has expanded meaning within her work. Yang will discuss how the contributions of her illustrators have shifted and deepened her stories, how the conversation between both opens up possibilities for readers of all ages, and what lives in between images and words: the breadth of the emotional landscape.

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American teacher, speaker, and writer. She is the award-winning author of the memoirs, The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, Somewhere in the Unknown World, and Where Rivers Part. Yang co-edited the groundbreaking book, What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Native Women and Women of Color. She is a librettist for The Song Poet Opera (commissioned by Minnesota Opera). Her children’s books, A Map Into the World, The Most Beautiful Thing, The Shared Room, Yang Warriors, From the Tops of the Trees, The Rock in My Throat, and Caged center Hmong children and families who live in our world, who dream, hurt, and hope in it. Yang’s work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Library Association, and has garnered four Minnesota Book Awards. She was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Carleton College. Yang is McKnight, Soros, and Guggenheim fellow. You can learn more about Kao Kalia Yang and her work on her website.

This event is sponsored by JSTOR (ITHAKA)

If you live in New England and interested in learning more about the VRA-New England Chapter and its members, or are already a current member of the chapter, please join us for an informal meet up at Gluek’s for drinks/dinner (at attendee’s expense) on Tuesday October 8^th from 6:30pm to 8pm. Meet in the Embassy Suites lobby a 6:25pm for the short walk to Gluek’s (16 N 6^th St), one of the oldest restaurants in Minneapolis. 

Option 1:
Hell's Kitchen [Sign up at Registration Desk]
Employee-owned American cuisine, with vegetarian options and live music — 8 minute walk from hotel
Address:
80 South 9th St.
Minneapolis, MN 55402
(612) 332-4700
Reservation Info:
Tuesday, October 8 @6:30 pm
up to 20 people
Separate checks requested

Option 2: 
The Market at Malcom Yards [Sign up at Registration Desk]
Explore Minneapolis's food hall scene! Dining options from Asian to vegan, plus self-service beer in a trendy industrial food court — short train ride from hotel
Address:
501 30th Avenue SE
Minneapolis MN, 55414
Reservation Info:
The Market at Malcom Yards does not take reservations, but the food hall can easily accommodate large groups.

Kick off the second day of the conference by sharing a meal with fellow VRA members! Grab some breakfast at the buffet and join your friends and colleagues around the tables in Ballroom B. Stay tuned for a short presentation honoring this year's Travel Award recipients, a few announcements, and an exclusive preview of our 2025 conference host city!

The pastmapr Project - Spatial History Simplified
Andreas Knab and Kevin Borg

This paper is a presentation of the pastmapr project, an open-source tool for visualizing historic maps, images, and stories on the web. Originally developed in 2017 and updated and extended since then, pastmapr allows students to overlay scans of historic maps and plans onto modern street or satellite maps and mark points of interest with descriptive text and images. Users can then interactively explore the content by toggling map overlays, adjust overlay transparency, and filter markers. pastmapr is used in a teaching environment bringing together students from a variety of disciplines, including history and geography. All the underlying technologies used in the project are open source, and the default map layers included are the publicly available OpenStreetMaps and Esri satellite images. Examples are available online at https://pastmapr.lib.jmu.edu/

Effective Digital Storytelling: Tools, Techniques, and Best Practices
Otto Luna

This paper will present various free digital platforms designed for digital storytelling and sharing oral histories online. We’ll explore platforms like ArcGIS StoryMaps, Adobe Express’s webpage-building tool, and storytelling tools from the Knight Lab at Northwestern University (such as StorylineJS and TimelineJS). I’ll also discuss examples of how I’ve used some of these tools with undergraduate art history students. Additionally, we’ll cover best practices for effective digital storytelling, including selecting the right platform, crafting compelling narratives, thoughtfully incorporating sound, using high-quality visuals, adding interactive elements, and ensuring accessibility.

Measuring Impact for Sustainable Digital Projects
Dominique Luster, Binky Lush, Linda Ballinger

In 2023, the Judy Chicago Research Portal presented a case study in hosting and developing an online portal aggregating the archives of a contemporary feminist artist held in multiple institutions. The project represents a model for collaboration, iterative development, and improving access and discoverability for both feminist art archives and collections at smaller institutions.

This presentation builds on that case study by delving into the measurable impact of the use and impact strategy employed by the Judy Chicago Research Portal. The proposal seeks to offer attendees practical strategies on how their libraries and archives can increase awareness and engagement with users of their digital projects, using the Judy Chicago Research portal as a study.

Like other digital library projects, the team behind the Research Portal is committed to ensuring its sustainability and promoting it intentionally in the academic community. However, the team's unique approach has combined conference presentations and social media engagement to enhance research visibility and reach. We will share insights for the non-social media expert on how we analyze website visits, user downloads, and social media engagement. Additionally, we will discuss how to leverage usage data via Google Scholar and website analytics to further investigate a project's success.

In this presentation, we will share key findings and data on how this strategy has increased research impact, present case studies highlighting specific successes from our collaboration model, and engage in open discussion on how similar digital projects can design a results-driven impact strategy.

Register for this tour (separate from conference registration)

Limited to 30 people — Cost: $10
Tour participants are responsible for transportation to and from the location.
Address: 725 Vineland Pl, Minneapolis, MN 55403

PRIOR REGISTRATION REQUIRED 

Enjoy a private guided tour of The Walker Art Center with your colleagues!

The Walker Art Center is a renowned multidisciplinary arts institution that presents, collects, and supports the creation of groundbreaking work across the visual and performing arts, moving image, and design. Guided by the belief that art has the power to bring joy and solace and the ability to unite people through dialogue and shared experiences, the Walker engages communities through a dynamic array of exhibitions, performances, events, and initiatives. Its multiacre campus includes 65,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the state-of-the-art McGuire Theater and Walker Cinema, and ample green space that connects with the adjoining Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The Garden, a partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, is one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States and home to the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Recognized for its ambitious program and growing collection of more than 15,500 works, the Walker embraces emerging art forms and amplifies the work of artists from the Twin Cities and from across the country and the globe. Its broad spectrum of offerings makes it a lively and welcoming hub for artistic expression, creative innovation, and community connection.

During the tour, one Walker Educator will be assigned to each group of 10 people. The one-hour tour will take attendees through two exhibitions, with time to explore on your own after:

This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection
Grounded in the many meanings and ideas of “home,” This Must Be the Place is a major new exhibition showcasing works drawn from across the Walker’s dynamic collections. The presentation ranges from iconic pieces to works shown here for the first time, offering a place to experience different stories and perspectives, both broad and complex. The exhibition unfolds over three galleries, with spotlight sections that give emphasis to core ideas of community, the urban environment, and the natural landscape.

The section titled Kith and Kin explores representations of friends, family, and community and highlights recent acquisitions by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Jennifer Packer, among others. The City centers on the urban environment and public spaces, whereas the Land will look at the natural landscape and forms of settlement. Across the galleries are visitor favorites, including paintings such as Franz Marc’s The Large Blue Horses (1911) and Edward Hopper’s Office at Night (1940). The reinstallation incorporates visitor feedback gathered from the prior exhibition Make Sense of This (2023), with special considerations to how works are presented and described to encourage understanding and engagement. Together, these works establish the collection as an evolving, living resource for communities and a home for hundreds of intersecting stories and voices.

Collection in Focus: Mungo Thomson
For nearly a decade, Mungo Thomson (US, b. 1969) has been creating a series of stop-motion animations that use reference encyclopedias, photo books, how-to guides, and production manuals as their raw material. The resulting videos, titled Time Life (2022) after their primary reference, showcase a wide array of human activity. Published from 1961 to 2003, the original Time-Life Books promised readers a way to “be an instant expert.” The publications shared knowledge on a range of subjects, from cooking to exercise, planting a garden to tying knots. Thomson considers those volumes, with their thousands of images, “an early analog internet.” Through high-resolution photography of the pages, Thomson brings the books to life. Set to a driving musical score, images flash by in a propulsive rhythm. Digitization becomes a method of transformation, the starting point for a conversation about history, cultural material, technology, and perception.

Watch The Walker's gallery rules video to help keep artworks and visitors safe.

Decades of Digital Asset Mismanagement: The Good, the Bad, and the Depressing
Bonnie Rosenberg

The Art Institute of Chicago’s digital asset crisis began with the advent of digital photography. As dark rooms were converted to digital photography studios, files started to pile up. Images lived on servers, discs, hard drives, and bespoke—often broken—repositories. The migration effort born from this backlog is both a cautionary and laudatory tale. When given an expanse of time to right the wrongs of the past, we did so with skill. But what we really needed to fix this problem was a time machine.

Rethinking Access and Discovery for Large Digital Image Collections
Rachel Jaffe and Sue Chesley Perry

As we approach another digital asset management system (DAMS) migration, the UC Santa Cruz Library is taking a look at our past practices and strategies in order to find more sustainable methods to managing legacy content and providing access to our new digital image collections. In this session, we will explore alternative strategies for discovery and access to these collections, with a focus on sustainability, usability, and the needs of our users. We will discuss the pros, cons, and unintended consequences of the three different approaches to access and discovery we’ve employed over the years: Comprehensive and custom description Mass digitization with iterative description Hierarchical metadata with a highly structured model By shifting our view of migration as just another step in digital object life cycle, and rethinking our access strategy to be more proactive, questions of sustainability and value arise, including: How much of these collections get used? Who are they being used by and to what end? Are they serving the needs of our patrons? Is the descriptive metadata work sustainable? Who is going to do all this work? We will share the ways we’re now approaching discovery, such as employing user testing, designing metadata and files that meet user needs, and being more selective about what we make accessible.

Museums and Libraries: A Roadmap for Collaboration
Jill Kambs and Peter Gorman

The Chazen Museum of Art and the UW-Madison Libraries have collaborated to extend the Libraries' digital collections infrastructure to meet the discovery, digital management, and preservation needs of the museum. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, we were able to incorporate new kinds of resources and workflows into our digital library platform, and implement the Libraries’ digital preservation service. Altogether, the resulting workflows and preservation service can now be offered to meet the needs of future external partners. The Libraries' existing architecture was key to the project’s success: a single digital ecosystem built from loosely-coupled components. We will demonstrate how this ecosystem ensures that 1) new features developed for this project automatically become available for future collaborations, 2) project partners can take advantage of selected components that best suit their needs, and 3) sustainability features of our core infrastructure are automatically applied to new partnerships. Standardized, flexible project management also contributed to successful collaboration. Using existing procedures for onboarding new project partners, focus groups to gather requirements, and an iterative, agile development process to show progress early and maintain momentum, we were able to quickly begin work and stay on track to meet grant milestones.

Refuel and connect with colleagues in between sessions!

Beverages: regular and decaf coffee, tea, assorted sodas
Snacks: assorted chips and crackers, fresh whole fruit

This event is sponsored by JSTOR (ITHAKA).

Current members of the Education Committee, as well as those interested in joining, are invited to join Committee Chairs Amy McKenna and Otto Luna for a discussion about the upcoming year. Over the past year, the Education Committee has taken on a leading role in developing programming for the VRA Conference. This meeting will focus on how the Committee can continue to pursue this objective, as well as brainstorm additional ideas to advance the Committee's mission of developing a wide range of educational resources and opportunities for VRA members.

The Developing Leadership Abilities panel aims to both encourage involvement in VRA leadership positions and share stories and lessons from people in leadership roles. The session will also touch on challenges related to taking on such a responsibility and address ways to balance a leadership role with everyday work and life.

A gathering of consortial partners and any VRA members interested in learning more about the Society of Architectural Historians' Color Film Emergency Project, Sonja Sekely-Rowland (PI) at the University of California at Riverside along with Jackie Spafford and Maureen Burns (project managers) welcome your participation in this informal opportunity to discuss the CFEP project and answer your questions. Please join us in Minneapolis or online for this hybrid SIG.

The SAH's Color Film Emergency Project is Addressing At-risk 35mm Architectural Slides Through a Consortium Work Model after being awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant 2024-2027. This NEH implementation grant expands on the previous work of identifying, processing, and making select SAH members’ 35mm slide collections digitally accessible. Amassed in the 1960-90s, these SAH member slides are threatened with loss, destruction, or environmental damage. They are valuable for documenting noteworthy contemporary and historic architecture, cultural heritage that is changing, and in some cases vanishing. Processing tasks will be completed through a consortium of partners at more than a dozen institutions across the US: archivists, visual resources professionals, librarians, and faculty. For the next three years, these partners will take on collection subsets for a number of tasks: assessing, organizing, cataloging, digitizing, and ultimately publishing in SAHARA on JSTOR. A large portion of the grant funds will be used for undergraduate student internships and graduate student fellowships, which provide valuable educational training and work experience.

For more details, please see: https://www.sah.org/about-sah/news/news-detail/2024/06/14/color-film-emergency-project-awarded-an-neh-implementation-grant

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has been digitizing a collection of more than 1,500 film negatives shot by Rauschenberg throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. These images are critical to research for the artist’s forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné. Anne Boissonnault, Digital Asset Specialist, will discuss this year-and-a-half long project, and concurrent and related initiatives, from pilot selection, to copy stand photography, to cataloging and metadata cleanup.

The Center for Creative Photography has recently completed the digitization of Lola Alvarez Bravo’s collection of negatives. Numbering over 30,000 negatives in different formats, this project is the culmination of a five year digitization effort. In this session Miles Scott, Digital Archivist at CCP, will discuss the scope of the project from beginning to end. He will also discuss tracking progress, reusing metadata, storage and public access.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden digitized 312 artworks (2D and 3D) by Marcel Duchamp in preparation for a two-year exhibition showcasing all works from a single donor, including condition assessment, cataloging, photography, and exhibition photography of these works. Julia Murphy, Head of Documentation and Archives, will share the digitization process from private donor’s home to museum gallery installation. "

The Detroit Institute of Arts is the home of a monumental fresco cycle executed by Diego Rivera in 1932-1933. The process was documented by Ford Motor Company photographer W.J. Stettler, and the DIA Research Library & Archives preserves a set of approximately 378 prints. In addition, the archives has 44 of Stettler's negatives which are in various stages of degradation. Archivist James E. Hanks will discuss recent activities to preserve the primary sources as well consider the value of re-scanning materials, and how this project has enhanced outreach for the DIA Research Library & Archives. The DIA plans to include archival imagery in a future iteration of its digital asset management system, as well as expanding the use of linked data to provide access to collection items. As Diego Rivera's murals are some of the most popular works in the museum, the archives has an important role in art historical documentation.

The Intellectual Property Rights Committee charge is to study and monitor intellectual property and copyright issues; and to develop and promote the Association's position on intellectual property rights issues and educate the membership on these issues. All are welcome to attend!

Grab a drink and connect with colleagues in between sessions!

Beverages: regular and decaf coffee, tea, assorted sodas

Implementing Local Contexts in Rights Management to Ground Indigenous Data Sovereignty
Emma Carter

Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields has incorporated Local Contexts as part of its standard protocol for object research and collection care. Newfields is committed to being an ethical steward of its art collections and Local Contexts provides tools to better our standards of care and communication with Indigenous communities. I will explain how Local Contexts' Cultural Institutional Notices have been incorporated into our collection management system and describe our future plans for Labels and consultations with Indigenous communities. Newfields continues to work to be in compliance with NAGPRA regulations and to be a better partner to Indigenous communities, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Creating a Guide for the course "Decolonization, Activism, and Hope: Changing the Way We See Native America"
Colette Lunday Brautigam

This presentation will detail how a digital collections librarian collaborated with a professor for the course “Decolonization, Activism, and Hope: Changing the Way We See Native America.” The students had a term-long assignment that culminated in a poster session and they could only use Indigenous sources. The professor wanted a LibGuide to support the assignment and worked with the librarian to make it a great resource. The students needed to assess sources and also use many resources outside library and library databases. This required them to learn to use research skills and critical thinking skills on the open web. The resources involved were videos, podcasts, OA journals, websites, and some journals in JSTOR and the catalog.

Acquisitions of Films from the Global South
Iris Yellum

Streaming media continues to be an essential resource for faculty and students. Despite wider availability and awareness of streaming for university libraries, difficulties remain in acquiring both physical and streaming media. It can be particularly difficult to acquire films from the Global South. The increasingly consumerist approach in higher education can mean that our collections are simply not a representation of broader film production trends. Even contemporary films featured in prominent film festivals can be difficult to acquire, especially those in regional languages. As academic library vendors continue to acquire each other, this is a loss for university libraries seeking to build diverse collections and provide access for undergraduate courses and film scholars. While we must certainly make choices about what to curate, it is important to consider how the democratization of filmmaking should be reflected in collection development. Our film collections increasingly look similar to each other as we outsource some or all of our film acquisitions to media vendors. This paper will discuss the importance of building a diverse film collection and the obstacles to achieving that.

You are invited to attend one of the big social events of VRA 2024 Minneapolis! Start your evening by visiting with VRA exhibitors as they showcase their products and services. Enjoy crudités and charcuterie, and use a complimentary drink ticket at the bar while you mingle with the poster presenters and learn more about their research and projects. Catch up with friends as you peruse the array of wonderful raffle prizes sponsored by vrcHost. Buy your tickets, with proceeds benefiting the VRA Travel Awards Endowment, and then prepare for your number to potentially be called by our guest MC. Please plan to join your colleagues and attend this exciting event!

Exhibitors

• JSTOR (ITHAKA) — Platinum Sponsor
• Clarivate — Gold Sponsor
• vrcHost — Bronze Sponsor
• Adam Matthew Digital
• Terentia
  

Posters

• "Creating inclusive educational content: DEIA in JSTOR instructional materials for librarians and users" — Elizbaeth Berenz, ITHAKA
• "From Past to Present: Migrating and Recreating Legacy Digital Exhibits for the Present Day" — Daniel Cichowlas, Wayne State University
• "The Esther Van Deman’s Handwritten Notes – Readable?" — Lavinia Ciuffa, American Academy in Rome
• "Photogrammetric 3D Modeling: Expanding Unique Collections Access at Wesleyan University" — Charlie Cofffey, Wesleyan University
• "Multidimensional Perspectives: Digitization and Display Methods for Historical 3D Media"  — Laura Darlington, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
• "Librarianship and Volunteering Provide a Link to Essential Partnerships" — John Hosford
• "Strengthening project partnerships through student-led digitization" — Mackenzie Reynolds, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• "Dissertation Digitization Project at Binghamton University Libraries" — Erin Rushton, Binghamton University
• "Helping Hands: Bring the Daily Worker to the World" — Michael Stasiak, New York University
• "Keeping Costs Low: Reclaim Hosting + Mukurtu CMS" — Molly Stothert-Maurer, Arizona State Museum
• "Margaret Alexander Corpus of Tunisian Mosaics Photographs: Techniques for Cataloging a 20,000+ Image Collection at the Item Level" — Anna Taylor, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
• "Developing a Framework for Digital Representation of a Multi-format Photo Collection at Ohio University Libraries" — Erin Wilson, Ohio University
• "Stranded No More: How Weekly Office Hours Bridge the Gap Between the Library and Fine Arts Students" — Anna Zook, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

All are invited to a night of fun and games out on the town, hosted by the Membership Committee!

Location to be announced soon!

Invitation Only

Presented by the Equitable Action Committee

Many states have passed legislation in the last few years that prevent funds being spent on DEI-focused work. Many GLAMR spaces receive public funding and, as such, are unable to move forward with work that is classified as falling under the DEI umbrella. This panel session seeks to explore the ways that DEI-focused work in GLAMR spaces has been impacted by such legislation. How do we move forward when DEI becomes a divisive term? How can we continue to support our VRA colleagues, as well as our patrons? What responsibility does VRA have to its members--how can we engage with these issues moving forward and codify DEI in our organization’s work?

This session will consider the current legal and technological landscape of fair use with images through the lens of the VRA Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study from 2013. What circumstances led to the Statement’s creation and use and how does it complement or diverge from other best practice documents? What gaps have developed in the last decade? Where does it meet or fail to meet practitioner and user needs? Presenters and attendees will be encouraged to discuss real-world scenarios they have encountered in their positions and how we might work together as a profession to navigate uncertain or unaddressed use cases. Is a revision worth the momentous effort? Can we envision other solutions?

Refuel and connect with colleagues in between sessions!

Beverages: regular and decaf coffee, tea, assorted sodas
Snacks: assorted Kind bars, fresh whole fruit

This session is open to anyone using or interested in MDID, and everybody is encouraged to ask questions or share about their experiences and use of MDID at their institutions. Andreas Knab from vrcHost will give a very brief update of changes made to the MDID3 application over the past year, with most of the session time dedicated for open discussion.

The Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) is a freely distributed, open source web application originally developed at James Madison University and now supported mainly by vrcHost.

This SIG is sponsored by vrcHost

Practicing digital preservation in a mindful way is critical for institutions to ensure that they are safeguarding their digital assets for future generations of researchers. Being “mindful” includes creating institutional policies around digital preservation that identify what should be preserved, why, and where. These policies should inform staff practices and workflows, including those concerning digitization and access. However, policies and practices can vary greatly across institutions due to differences in institutional priorities, resources such as staff availability and knowledge, and type of digital assets an institution holds.

Through a series of 7-minute lightning talks, session attendees will learn about different strategies that a variety of institutions have taken to advocate for, craft, and implement digital preservation policies and/or practices, and the successes and challenges of digital preservation endeavors. Talks featured in this session include both large and small institutions at various points in their digital preservation journey.

Summer Shetenhelm, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Kendall Aughenbaugh, Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Scott Kirycki, University of Notre Dame
Ellen LeClere, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University
Grant Mandarino, Providence Archives

Please note, the cost of this event is included in your conference registration fee. However, for catering arrangements, you must indicate whether or not you will attend when you register for the conference.

Join the Awards committee to recognize your colleagues and enjoy a provided boxed lunch!

The Awards + Recognition event a special highlight of every annual Visual Resources Association conference. This is the organization's opportunity to honor individuals and teams of information professionals for distinguished achievements or outstanding career contributions. This event shines a light on leading-edge efforts and accomplishments in the educational, cultural heritage and commercial image management environments. It potentially includes the VRA Distinguished Service Award, the Nancy DeLaurier Award, the Honorary Life Members Award and the new vrcHost Membership Awards. These are bestowed to acknowledge and celebrate the highest achievements in the visual resources profession.

This event is sponsored by Clarivate.

Since our last pre-pandemic meeting, digital humanities has truly become a significant aspect of the expanded role of many visual resources professionals. This group session seeks to revive the VRA Digital Humanities SIG, building a renewed professional network that supports open knowledge sharing and a sprit of technological adventure. In an informal environment, we will make introductions, share about our workplace roles and current projects, and discuss relevant topics and common trends as they emerge. We will also seek to define how the Digital Humanities SIG can best serve its members throughout the course of the year.

This SIG is sponsored by vrcHost

Since 2020, DPLA has worked with contributing partners to upload their open access digital content to Wikimedia Commons. Staff at Minitex and the Minnesota Digital Library were inspired by the success of the DPLA project and conceived of their own pilot to learn more about using the wiki-based, free-to-use media repository called Wikimedia Commons, along with its sister sites Wikidata and Wikipedia, to increase discoverability of content from digital collections. The outcomes from this successful pilot project included an expanded understanding of the Wikimedia platforms, increased discovery of digital content, and the recognized benefits of working together. Due to the enthusiastic success of the pilot project, we are continuing the project in 2024.

The presenters will discuss both the 2023 and 2024 Minitex Wikimedia projects, how we added archival images to Wikimedia Commons, WIkipedia, and added structured data (linked data) from Wikidata. Participants will learn about our goals, outcomes and impact on access and use, and some tips on how to get started with a Wikimedia project at your own organization.

Hands-On blended Pedagogies: Undergraduates, Special Collections, and Digital Collection building
Amanda Matava

The Digital Asset Management Department at Trinity College has partnered with a faculty member to pilot a course for undergraduates incorporating digital imaging, cataloging, and research in order to explore Trinity's new special collection of Thai buddhist amulets. Amanda Matava, Digital Archivist, will discuss the first two iterations of the class, lessons learned, and success stories with letting undergrads get hands-on with a copystand camera and cataloging platform.

Digitization: Practical Foundations for Digital Scholarship
Krystal Boehlert and Mark Buchholz

This paper will share how the UCR Library developed and implemented the 2023 Digital Scholarship Summer Certificate program for undergraduates. Our goals were that students would gain archival and digital research skills by engaging deeply with primary sources that highlight student activism and BIPOC student voices at UCR. The workshops roughly followed the digital project lifecycle by introducing archival research, imaging in the archives, metadata and data management, OCR, text analysis, and digital exhibits. In these workshops, we specifically highlighted digitization methods with low barriers to entry and accessible OCR tools. We also included mentions and demonstrations of higher-end imaging and processing tools such as digital copy stands, RAW processing workflows, and dedicated OCR applications such as Tesseract and ABBYY FineReader, in order to give students a roadmap for more advanced digital projects and their needs. Not only were we hoping to make the invisible labor visible, but we wanted students to understand the human decisions that go into creating research materials and how they as scholars make decisions about their research outputs.

Collaborative Stewardship: Revitalizing a Small Library Collection Through Faculty Student Partnerships
John Hosford

This presentation will showcase a successful collaboration between a librarian, an art historian, and students to research, preserve, and curate a digital and physical collection of 27 brass rubbings from 1967. I will discuss the process of bringing this collection to life, the steps taken to digitize and make the rubbings accessible, and the impact this project has had on my approach to librarian-faculty collaboration. I will also emphasize the potential for future collaborations between libraries, faculty, and students to create engaging educational experiences and meaningful digital collections. The value of partnerships that focus on preserving and showcasing library collections while enabling students to gain experience creating metadata in a collection management system is invaluable. This project has inspired future collaborative projects that combine library resources, faculty expertise, and student creativity.

Register for this tour (separate from conference registration)

Limited to 20 people — Free
Tour participants are responsible for transportation to and from the location.
Address: 2400 Third Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55404

PRIOR REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Join us for an exclusive visit to the Visual Resources Studio at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Participants will receive an overview of the latest techniques in cultural heritage imaging, including advanced methods for capturing, cataloging, storing and sharing reproduction media for works of art. This session is perfect for professionals interested in learning more about the current best practice for creating visual documentation of museum collections. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from experts and explore state-of-the-art imaging tools and processes.

Connect, create, kick back! Meet at Mia is a new series of free Thursday evening events for adults. Get to know us—and each other—with live music, art making, special programs, and unique food and drink (for purchase). No registration or secret handshake required.

Attendees are responsible for transportation to and from Mia.