Smithsonian Libraries

New Addition to AAPG’s Artist Book Collection

The Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery (AAPG) Library is pleased to acknowledge the donation of the artist book Florence by Laura Davidson. The book was donated by a library staff member and can be found in the online catalog.

 

Florence, Laura Davidson. 2003.

The AAPG Library has a collection of artist books (a book or book-like object that is intended as a work of art by its creator) and currently has a display of examples in the reading room. An interview with the book artist Laura Davidson has been featured previously on this blog. The AAPG previously had 5 books by this artist in its collection, but not any of her tunnel books.

 

Florence, Laura Davidson. 2003.

 

A tunnel books consist of a set of pages bound with two folded accordion strips and viewed through a central hole in the cover. The pages consist of a series of illustrations cut in different shapes and placed one behind the other. Openings in each of the pages page permit the viewer to see through the entire book to the back, and images on each page work together to create a sense of depth. What results is a dimensional scene like looking into a tunnel.

Florence is the first in a series that show the artist’s favorite views. This book shows a panorama of the city of Florence from the steps of the church of San Miniato al Monte. The artist has painted on Muirhead guides and Baedeker travel guides. The book is printed on #65 Mohawk superfine Warm White and the pages are laser cut and assembled by hand.

The AAPG library is delighted to add this book to its artist book collection and is grateful for the generosity of the donor. The book will now be available to users for display and study for generations to come.

The Future of Information Alliance

The Smithsonian, along with nine other organizations, is a founding partner of the Future of Information Alliance. FIA, hosted by the University of Maryland, is described by co-director Ira Chinoy as a "thinktank without walls", interested in fostering interdisciplinary discussions of the role of information in our lives.

 

FIA stickers from Launch Week.

 

From November 14th-18th, the University of Maryland held a weeklong launch for the FIA, with five brainstorming discussion sessions. I was happy to be able to attend two of these sessions, "Visiting Future-ists" and "Creativity and Culture". Both sessions featured "future-ists" Dan Russel, director of user happiness for Google, Mary Czerwinski, from Microsoft's VIBE group, and Abdur Chowdhury, former chief scientist at Twitter. In the first session, the future-ists described their own work and the opportunities and challenges they saw in information. In the second session, the future-ists were joined by several University of Maryland faculty members to discuss the role that creativity could play in innovation and information. Other sessions over the week were "Transparency and Boundaries" and "Science in Our Lives". 

 

Dan Russell, Mary Czerwinski, Abdur Chowdhury. Photo by Evan Golub.

Courtesy of FIAumd on Flickr.

 

Both of the sessions that I attended included lively discussion. In the "Visiting Future-ists" meeting, Dan Russell noted that only 10% of English-speaking web users were aware of the Ctrl+F feature used to search a document or web page. This worried many people in the audience. When someone asked the panel how to bridge a tech divide like this, Mary Czerwinski posited that the problem isn't teaching people, the problem is that Ctrl + F is a poor user interface and isn't intuitive.  Another interesting quote came from Abdur Chowdhury, when an audience member asked what one should do if he or she realizes the academic institution wasn't a good fit for him or her. Chowdhury responded, "It's called a 'library'".

Besides creating interesting discussion on the future of information, FIA hopes to announce a seed grant program in the next few months. Winning projects will be characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to solving real information problems. I look forward to seeing what these innovative projects may be!

Smithsonian Libraries Website Redesign - Coming soon!

The Smithsonian Libraries' website is getting a makeover! The stars have aligned to bring together the elements necessary to initiate a top-to-bottom redesign and reorganization of the Libraries' presence on the internet. If you've explored our site at all, you have found that there is a wealth of information there and we are happy to announce that are planning to keep all of the rich, interesting and informative content that makes our site unique on the Internet.

The "stars" that have aligned include the availability of Drupal 7, on which we will develop the website. Drupal is an open-source content management platform for websites and web applications. It is installed on millions of websites around the world and has a strong user community that contributes to the 12,000+ modules that make Drupal versatile and powerful. Another "star" that has aligned is the availability of a developer, that's me, to develop the site and organize the migration of thousands of pages of content. The final "star" contributing is the encouragement and drive to tackle what initially looks to be an insurmountable task. However, we feel it is possbile to move a mountain with a spoon. 

Here's background information. The Libraries' website consists (briefly) of...

...440,000 files total
...289,000 images
...87,000 web pages
...46,000 PDF files
...400 online books
...12,000 images in Galaxy of Images
...35 online exhibitions 

There is content dating back to 1995 on the website, so we feel it's high time to bring the site into the 21st century and give us the ability to create a modern website that can be easily managed by our general staff on a day-to-day basis. Another goal of the redesign is to reduce the amount of time it takes for us to develop new sections of the site. This eliminates barriers and bottlenecks that exist in our current ColdFusion setup. Another goal of the redesign is to reorganize the navigation and structure of our web-space, provide more meaningful URLs to our content, and generally make our content and site more friendly to search engines. Finally, we are going to implement a higher standard of Section 508 accessible features.

From a content point of view, all of our online books, which make up a large majority of the files on our site, will move to the Internet Archive. Viewing our "digital collection" of books will still take place on our website, but the images will be served from the Internet Archive itself. Our online exhibitions, many of which have a rich and detailed graphic design, will also be migrated to Drupal, but we plan to maintain the graphic design as much as possible while still migrating the content to Drupal's database.

The website will be migrasted in two phases. The first phase will set us up on our new Drupal 7 platform with the basic informational content about the Libraries. The second phase will take longer and will be comprised of all content in the new Digital Library part of our website. The digital library will include, as much as possible, Linked Open Data to enable our visitors and users to reuse our data and link their data to ours. To learn more about linked data, visit http://linkeddata.org/

We expect that the first phase of development will begin in December 2011 and will likely be ready for launch in early March 2012. Phase two will be an ongoing process and will take place incrementally over many months. We'll keep you up to date here on the blog as to our progress and some of the things that we learn during the process of redeveloping our site. 

 

ARLIS/NA Art Librarians visit the Libraries

Last month the Smithsonian Libraries hosted the fall meeting of the Washington DC, Maryland & Virginia Chapter of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). Close to 30 art and architecture librarians from the region came for a day of learning about some of the initiatives spearheaded by the libraries balanced with an exhibition and library tour at the Freer/Sackler.

 

 

Erin Rushing, the Digital Images Librarian and Social Media Co-Chair for SIL gave a presentation about the Libraries’ social media initiatives. Recently a working group was organized in order to coordinate SIL’s outreach through social media. Social media gives SIL the opportunity to connect directly with SIL’s users, fans, and friends, as well as to connect with each other while allowing staff and users to easily and quickly share information, generate ideas, and participate in discussions.  With initial focus on the blog, Facebook, and Twitter, strategies and goals for each platform are being developed adapting what works best. Since this group effort is still new and evaluation is still being developed, the group is just beginning to discover what works best and what our users like and respond to. Ultimately the Libraries hopes to promote engagement and to increase the tools that we can serve its users.

Doug Litts, the Branch Librarian for the American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library talked about the various digital projects that the Smithsonian Libraries is pursuing with emphasis on the art resources that are made available to researchers worldwide, such as the Galaxy of Images, the Art and Artists Files database, the Edward F. Caldwell Collection, and the Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web. He also discussed the Library’s digitization of history, art, and culture material and uploading to the Internet Archive. Doug also discussed other initiatives that SIL is investigating, such as discovery services which would provide greater access to the wide range of resources the Libraries have available online; and the investigation of the purchase of ebooks.

 

 

In the afternoon, the group was met by Kathryn Phillips and Yue Shu, two librarians from the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library. Kathryn gave a tour and history of the library with emphasis on Freer’s dedication to and continuous support of libraries and books. Shu provided a look at a variety of Chinese books books related to the Qing dynasty in China that reflected a tour by the museum archivist of the exhibition Power|Play: China's Empress Dowager. Kathryn and Shu also talked about their interests and how they came to work in the library.

In all the day provided the opportunity to meet with colleagues, share ideas and programs, and to think about the future in art librarianship.