In this issue: Message from the Chair Nominating Committee Report 2004 The Special Librarian as Museum Exhibition Curator Congratulations to the 2004 DMAH Travel Grant Winner DMAH Selects 2004 William B. Neff Scholarship Recipient Are Librarians Keepers of America’s Culture? Member News Needed: Assistant Bulletin Editor New MAHD members MAHD Committee chairs MAHD Officers About the MAHD Bulletin

Spring greetings to all DMAH members! When this e-bulletin is published, it will be very close to annual conference time in Nashville. We are expecting to have an excellent conference, filled with interesting and educational programs and events. I certainly hope many DMAH members will attend.

If you are in Nashville, please come by our DMAH Board meetings on Sunday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Most importantly, I invite members to attend the Annual Business Meeting on Tuesday at 9 a.m. This is the time when members may share issues most important to them and their institutions and help the Division focus plans and projects to suit their needs. Without input from you, our members, we cannot plan programs to meet your professional development needs. To keep DMAH strong and healthy, we really do need input from our membership.

Programs at the Nashville conference sponsored or co-planned by DMAH are easily found on the Division’s website: http://www.sla.org/division/dmah/2004%20Conference.htm. Please take a look and place these on your personal calendar. SLA has an easy-to-use online personal conference planner that allows you to select programs and input them into your own scheduler. There are excellent programs offered by other divisions which will be pertinent to many members' needs and interests.

A new Archival and Preservation Caucus is being convened by a DMAH member Sandra Schock. She invites interested DMAH members to attend the first caucus meeting on Tuesday at 3:45 p.m. Alas, DMAH is co-sponsoring a program on managing one's archives, records, and library at the very same time, but perhaps you can attend part of both sessions. I am happy to announce that Sandra has agreed to serve as our Division Archivist, taking over that role from Joe Hovish. Joe has been our archivist for years, and we applaud his many years of service.

Our Chair for 2004/05, Sylvia Frank, will be asking for other volunteers for next year's committee positions. Please consider stepping up when asked; usually the time commitment is minimal, but the work is essential. We need to spread out the tasks among many members, thereby reducing the load on a few. For students or recent graduates, this is a great opportunity to become professionally active. Do come to our Board or Annual Business meetings to introduce yourselves and tell us your interests.

I am pleased that our slate of Officers for 2004/05 is so strong. Their names, affiliations, and a link to their biographies are provided in this bulletin. Thanks to those members who have accepted leadership! We look forward to more years of quality programs led by our DMAH officers.

As 2003/04 Chair, who will become Past-Chair on the last day of the Nashville conference, I thank the membership for their support of our programs. We have made the transition this year to being all electronic. Not printing our Bulletin allows more funds to be spent on programs, initiatives, and leadership development. I thank our Bulletin editors, Stephanie Orphan and Nancy Adams, for managing this transition so well. I thank our Treasurer, Mary Marshall, for tending our finances so carefully. I thank our Past-Chair, Ann Shea, for answering my emails with advice on managing our Division. I thank our Chair-Elect, Sylvia Frank, for leading us towards our next conference in her home city, Toronto. I thank Eliza Robertson, International Relations chair, who helped select our travel grant awardee, Niala Dwarika-Bhagat. Niala will attend our Nashville programs and will be glad to meet DMAH members. My appreciation goes to Linda Andrews who has served as our Secretary and our website manager, two very important positions. I thank all our officers and committee chairs, past and present, for their contributions to the Division of Museums, Arts and Humanities.

This is my personal swan song for professional service. I have been a librarian since 1971, working in medical, technical, industrial, rare books, and academic libraries. I have served as President of the San Diego Chapter and now as Chair of our Division. I have been active in local, national and international library associations. I will continue to work for a few years on a reduced time schedule and will continue to attend SLA and IFLA conferences. Being an active member of SLA has allowed me to visit many interesting cities in the U.S. and in the world. I have had my personal horizons broadened; I have met wonderful colleagues; it has been fun as well as educational. I hope many others will take on the challenges facing us all in our profession, and will accept leadership roles to help us meet the challenges ahead. Together in our association I know we will be successful. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you as Chair of DMAH, and best wishes to each and every member!

The Nominating Committee of the Division of Museums, Arts and Humanities would like to give notice to the membership of the annual election of officers. The election will take place at the Division's Annual Business Meeting at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Nashville on Tuesday, June 8, 2004, at 9:00 a.m.

The Nominating Committee reports the following slate of Officers for election for the 2004/2005 term:

Chair-Elect: Gerald F. Patout, Jr., Head Librarian, Williams Research Center of The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana

Secretary: John Shea, Archives, Union Bank of California, Los Angeles, California

Treasurer: Mary E. Marshall, Greenwood Publishing Grp. Inc, Westport, Connecticut

Current elected officers will assume these posts for 2004/2005:

Chair: Sylvia Frank, The Film Reference Library, Toronto, Canada

Past-Chair: Martha E. McPhail, San Diego State University, San Diego, California

Biographies of the candidates are on the DMAH website: http://www.sla.org/division/dmah/slate_of_officers.htm

Working as curator of the exhibition, Plant Portraits: the California Legacy of A. R. Valentien, which had its world premiere at the San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) in December 2003, has definitely been the high point of my career as a librarian. It has been enormously satisfying personally, as well as professionally. The entire project took almost five years. This chapter in my life as a librarian began soon after I arrived at SDNHM in August 1997. I had just been hired as Director of the Research Library, after moving to California from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had obtained my library degree and worked in two different special libraries at the University of Michigan.

In addition to my MLIS degree, I have a master’s degree in biology and have worked for many years as a botanical illustrator. I have had a keen interest in plants and animals since my childhood growing up in Florida, so I was excited to begin working at the SDNHM library where I would be learning about California flora and fauna. Little did I know, however, that in addition to the books, journals, maps, rare books, and archives in this 98,000- volume library, there was a stunning collection of over 1000 original watercolors of California native plants, painted nearly a century ago by the artist A. R. Valentien. This collection has been in the holdings of the SDNHM since 1933, but had never before been viewed by the public. These exquisite paintings, painstakingly accurate in their depiction of over 1500 species of California native plants, display a spontaneity and liveliness that underlines their ageless appeal.

Valentien conducted his fieldwork and executed these paintings over a 10-year time period, from 1908 to 1918, commissioned by San Diego philanthropist and amateur natural historian Ellen Browning Scripps. Originally the plan was to publish his work in a large volume illustrating the flora of California. Sadly, due to cost constraints the work remained unpublished and in 1925 Valentien died of a heart attack. Miss Scripps passed away in 1932, and bequeathed the entire collection of priceless paintings to the SDNHM Research Library, where they arrived in 1933.

There they remained, stored in wooden cabinets and locked away in a special room within the library. Although the paintings had been carefully protected and much admired by the various librarians over the years, only a very few visitors had been able to see them. When I looked at the superior quality of these artworks, and opened up drawer after drawer of delicately painted images, as fresh today as they were when they were created so long ago, I reflected on the awesome responsibility of these beautiful artworks now being entrusted to my care, and it became my main goal to share these paintings with the public.

I began by investigating the collection further. I was haunted by the fact that we had no documentation of the paintings in the library of the paintings. One of my first priorities was to have them photographed in case, heaven forbid, a water or fire disaster should occur. I wanted the collection to be examined by a paper conservator, to determine what state they were in and to make recommendations as to their proper care. In these respects as in others regarding this collection, we were hindered by the sheer volume of the art works. Professional art photography is very expensive, and when one needs to have 1094 images photographed in large format 5 ´X 7 transparencies, as well as examined meticulously by a professional conservator, costs become substantial. The SDNHM, like many non-profits, labors under extremely tight budgets and the Research Library was barely able to maintain existing book and journal collections, much less cover these kinds of expenses. After developing a long-term plan and budget for the basic needs of the collection, I applied for various grants but was turned down. However, this research and preparation paid off in the end, because in November of 1999, a serendipitous meeting occurred in my library.

As part of the training for our museum docents, each fall I conduct a tour of the library and share with them our resources and a few of our treasures, such as the Valentien paintings. In 1999, one of our new docents was Eleanor Navarra. After seeing these artworks, and hearing me lament the fact that we had no funds to preserve, document, appraise, and display this collection, she approached me, saying that perhaps she and her husband could help. Eleanor and her husband, Jerry Navarra, own Jerome’s Furniture in San Diego. Things happened very quickly after that. I outlined for the Navarras all the projects I had in mind for the collection and they committed whole-heartedly to the project.

From 1999 to 2002, I supervised the photography, documentation and cataloging, updating of nomenclature, conservation assessment, re-housing, and professional appraisal of the art works. I was really grateful that my background was in botany, since manipulating lists of over a thousand paintings by scientific name would have proved impossible otherwise. I was also busy with my own research into the history of the collection and Valentien’s life, which included contacting various other libraries and archives, as well as art dealers and museums, to track down primary sources about Valentien and his time in California. When The Irvine Museum, an art museum in Irvine, CA California, whose mission includes bringing early California artists to greater public awareness, learned that the Navarras had already paid for the fine art photography, they committed to joint publication of a fine art book that would serve also as a catalog for the coming exhibition.

In addition to being first author on the book, I was responsible for lining up other authors to contribute essays, select and organize the plants to be illustrated, write captions, and work with the book designer and editor to finalize copy. The Irvine Museum covered all costs of the book, while the SDNHM was responsible for creating the exhibition. I also collaborated with our museum store and other staff members to design and market products based on the images, such as note cards and fine art prints (See see www.sdnhm.org/store/valentiens.html ). All these activities were juggled with the day-to-day operations of the library, and the fact that we were also undergoing a major renovation of our facilities, so things were busy indeed.

I worked very closely with our talented exhibit, graphics, and marketing staff to design and construct the exhibit layout, create the text for all signage, the graphics used in all the banners, exhibit labels, and marketing pieces. Along with our website manager, a talented volunteer and I hustled to get the exhibit website (www.sdnhm.org/valentien/plantportraits) up and running. I negotiated with other institutions in Balboa Park and private collectors for loans of items on display in the exhibit, and spoke to numerous members of the press about the story behind the collection.

Finally, on December 12, 2003, we opened the show to the public with a gala Opening Reception. The day of the opening I stood outside and watched as our exhibits crew maneuvered the 18-foot long banners advertising the exhibition, with Valentien’s stunning white Matilija poppy as the main image, into place. As the huge banner unfurled on the outside of our building in Balboa Park, with Valentien’s name and artwork for all the world to see for the first time, I actually felt the hairs on my arms stand up. It was such an emotional moment! It is not often that a librarian gets to participate in something as thrilling and exciting as this, and I have relished all of it.

The exhibition is on display at SDNHM through September 7, 2004, and then begins touring the U.S. I will be traveling to each of six venues over the next two years, as part of our agreement with The Irvine Museum, which is underwriting all costs of the tour. By the time the tour is completed, I feel sure that the public will finally better appreciate A.R. Valentien’s name and talent, and that is very gratifying indeed.

The Division of Museums, Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce the recipient of our 2004 travel grant to attend the 2004 SLA conference in Nashville. Niala Dwarika-Bhagat is pursuing her MLIS remotely from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She works as a Documentalist at the Festival Library and Cultural Resource Centre, Centre for Creative and Festival Arts, at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad, Trinidad & Tobago. The Centre offers undergraduate majors in Theatre Arts, Carnival Arts, Visual Arts, and Musical Arts. Niala works with photographs, books, sound records, and sound reels that document the lively cultural festivals of the West Indies.

DMAH received 50 applications from librarians worldwide and could award just one. The grant provides $1000 towards travel, pays registration fees, and buys all the ticketed events sponsored by DMAH. This is the third year the travel grant has been offered. In 2003, there were 15 applicants and in the first year there were only 3. Many applicants work in libraries outside DMAH's scope. It is clear that SLA has appeal to many librarians and information specialists around the world. With more divisions and chapters offering travel grants, SLA members will benefit greatly from internationalizing our association.

Niala looks forward to meeting DMAH members in Nashville and sharing information about her current project. She is creating a photographic exhibition of public library buildings in Trinidad and Tobago. Niala will share what she learns at SLA with her colleagues in the West Indies.

Please come meet Niala at DMAH programs, board meetings, and events. We are happy to have her join us!

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We have a winner for the 2004 William B. Neff Scholarship. Kristin Yiotis, a first-year student in the program at San Jose State University, San Jose, California, wrote a very thought provoking essay on the role of the librarian as a keeper of the society's culture. She will be with us in Nashville to receive her award. The award winning paper is below. Congratulations, Kristin!

Does the socially constructed role of librarians as keepers of society's culture cover the current reality for librarians and information professionals? In the past, American society regarded the public library as a bastion of culture and learning, physically embodied in the classic edifices of the Carnegie libraries. And the existing paradigm for librarians was as keepers of our culture. Today, however, while the library's place in the community remains, the role of the librarian has shifted. And librarians played a major part in this shift.

I attribute the Internet as the cause of this shift, and I ascribe the librarian as the agent in bringing it about. Librarians democratized the Internet. The act of bringing the Internet into the library, performed in the great tradition of the free library as the people's university, brought the Internet into the reach of ordinary people. And with librarians relying on the Internet, the public began using this information resource.

While this changed people's lives, it also changed people's concept of the library. People went to the library to get in touch, not necessarily with the great books and thoughts of great men, but to get in touch with other people. Students could e-mail their professors; high school students could exchange information with research scientists. We can now talk with kings and presidents by sending them e-mail, and we might just get a reply.
Moving the Internet into the library moved it into mainstream America. Librarians influenced the way the American people thought about the Internet. Librarians helped to establish the Internet as the primary information resource for American society. When librarians made the Internet available without cost at the library, the public gained direct access to information that used to be locked away in books, to which librarians held the keys.

In changing the role that libraries play in the community, the Internet has expanded the role of librarians. Direct, free access to the Internet, changed the public's access to information, which in turn changed the public's perception of libraries and librarians. Now librarians act more as educators, helping patrons answer their own information questions rather than providing patrons with answers.

Technological changes and market forces have restructured the role of librarians from guardians or keepers of our culture to purveyors of information. The purveyor, or person who furnishes or distributes, is especially apt because the public library is still the social equalizer, more importantly so in the age of information technology. The public library provides free Internet access in communities all over the country, communities where the public library may be the only place in town with a high-speed Internet link.

If the Internet is now an integral part of American culture, then the original premise might still hold true: The librarian is the keeper of America's culture, but keeper is too passive a term. In order to stay funded, libraries and librarians today must actively purvey, which means advertise or circulate, their services, in addition to supplying or furnishing services when requested.

And so it is ironic that the Internet is ultimately changing the existing paradigm for librarians. I'm in my first year of library school. Based on the discussions we've had in classes, I think that students entering library school today do not see their future roles as librarians as keepers of the culture. Discussions about guarding American culture revolve around intellectual freedom, censorship, and the Patriot Act.

Students today see the librarian of the future as an information architect. One student thinks the technical work of librarians will move offshore. She thinks that anyone who understands the information needs of the consumer and can provide personal and specialized services will play a key role in the future, be it reference librarian or information architect.

Another student argues that reference work could move offshore, but it depends on how successful India and other countries are at providing customer services in a manner that appeals to western society. Today American consumers aren't satisfied with the current level of service that comes from overseas.

With this shift away from culture and toward information, institutions like libraries are more affected by market factors and less by social customs. If reference services also move offshore, would our society's culture be left unguarded?

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President-Elect of the North Carolina Chapter of SLA is Eliza Robertson, Library Director of the National Humanities Center.

Gerald Patout, Head Librarian at the Historic New Orleans Collection has recently been elected as the Vice-President of Education of the New Orleans preservation-based organization Save Our Cemeteries. SOC, dedicated to New Orleans largest and most fascinating "outdoor" museums, the historic cemeteries, is also responsible for fostering a public appreciation of the architectural and cultural value of these urban artifacts through restoration services and educational programs.

John Shea was honored in January by Union Bank of California for 25+ years of service to the Bank. He is the current Membership Chair of the Division and candidate for Secretary for 2004-06.

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The Bulletin of the Division of Museums, Arts and Humanities is looking for a volunteer Assistant Bulletin Editor. Responsible for proofreading and light copyediting of the online Bulletin. The assistant editor serves in this capacity for two years, then moves on to become the bulletin editor for two years.

The Bulletin is published quarterly—your time commitment will be minimal, but the job is important. This is a great opportunity to get involved with your Division, hone your written communication skills, and find out what's going on before everyone else does!

If interested, please contact Nancy Adams nancy@nladams.com.

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