MAHDNESS or madness? Division Chair is an opportunity to lead! Museum, Arts and Humanities Division members traditionally have their informal social gathering at conference on Monday evening and refer to the event as “Monday Mahdness”. However, for newly elected division chair Gerald Patout this event is not only an energizing and refreshing social gathering for professional networking, but an opportunity to lead and direct this 600+ SLA member unit into new and uncharted territory. Established in 1929 as the Museum Group of SLA, division status was granted to this group in 1971. Museum, Arts and Humanities Division generally appeals to and attracts librarians and information specialists from all types of museums, including art, science and history museums, historical societies and other organizations having special collections focused on arts, architecture and the humanities. An additional forum provided for MAHD membership is in the area of publishing and the various aspects of the publishing process. As the MAHD chair contemplates his new term of office to run 18 months to meet new changes in SLA calendar and budget year, the usual duties spring to mind: regularly publishing the division’s electronic newsletter in an interesting fashion; encouraging membership to participate at various levels and times; and, planning for and conducting top-notch professional programs at the 2006 SLA conference in Baltimore. Additionally, the division offers two award scholarships, the Neff Scholarship for a student in library school to attend the SLA annual conference and the International Travel Grant that enables a foreign professional librarian from a developing country to also attend the annual conference. The chair must ensure these awards are well publicized and that the awards truly recognize noteworthy and outstanding library professionals. Additional information on both of the MAHD awards can be found at the division web site at http://www.sla.org/division/dmah/. To whet one’s appetite for the 2006 conference and tentative plans being formulated by the MAHD chair, a number of excellent programs are already on the drawing board; see the article below for details about the exciting preliminary program. In previous years “Monday Mahdness” was assigned to the division’s Monday night social events, but in the coming year, Chair Gerald Patout hopes he can translate a new feel and commitment for one of SLA’s most interesting divisions into an extended period of energized service and professional development for the membership. Visit to the National Cinema Museum, Turin, Italy By Sylvia Frank, Past Chair, MAHD I had the opportunity to visit the National Cinema Museum in Turin, Italy (Il Museo del Cinema nella Mole Antonelliana di Torino). The National Museum began in 1941 as a project created by a historian and collector, Maria Adriana Prolo. The Museum has been a member of FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives, since 1953. In 1992 the Museum became a Foundation and in 2000 the new museum was inaugurated. The Museum is located inside a historic structure designed by Alessandro Antonelli in 1863, called Mole Antonelliana. The tower until recently was the highest masonry structure in Europe; it is over 500 feet tall. Originally designed as a synagogue it has been always been a familiar landmark in Turin. The exterior shell of the Mole has been retained but inside has been renovated and designed to house a museum that takes up five floors accessible by an interior ramp, reminiscent of the Guggenheim, called the Winding Walkway. The interior space within the Mole is called the Temple. Inside the Temple an exposed elevator runs from the ground floor past the five floors of exhibits and up through the Mole to an observation platform that allows the visitor to see all of Turin and the Alps. Thus, even tourists without an interest in film can take the elevator to the observation deck but they are actually moving up through the museum space. It makes this museum a “destination” for anyone visiting the city. The museum itself is exquisite. The permanent collection, which tells the history of the moving image, is beautifully laid out. The first display area consists of shadow puppets and the whimsy and playfulness is continued throughout the exhibit. Visitors have the opportunity to use equipment and so they are engaged in the exhibit. For example, they can use a crank camera to view a peep show, watch lantern slides, and spin zoetropes. But this is a fraction of the exhibit, which continues to cover the history of cinema to the present; pays tribute to all the film crafts; and recreates the theatre experience throughout the century. The importance of television and the digital age are also highlighted by two installations. On the main floor of the Temple, the perimeter is a re-creation of a number of different types of theatres and re-interpretations of theatres such as a walk-in refrigerator with toilet seats as theatre seats. Bright red comfortable lounge chairs are provided for visitors to watch films and to gaze up at the tower and see zoetropes projected on the ceiling. The temporary exhibit “Things from Another World. Journey into Science-Fiction Cinema” was created to honour Science Fiction film. It had 300 posters from the Silent Era to the present. The full-size Italian version of the King Kong poster was just one of the stunning graphic offerings. Included in the exhibit was a private collection of Star Wars merchandising collected by one individual since 1977. The museum also has a lovely restaurant where the tables have interactive screens imbedded in them. There is also a bookstore that has a good selection of film books and merchandise. It takes about two hours to view everything in the museum but one could easily spend longer and it is definitely a museum one would return to again. The museum is situated on a car free street and less than a block away is the theatre complex associated with the museum. The outdoor pedestrian mall includes outdoor cafes and restaurants—perfect for meeting with friends before or after screenings. The area seemed devoted to film culture with lots of film posters lining the streets as well. I would recommend a visit to anyone who finds themselves in Italy near the French border. The museum has so much to offer and works on so many levels. The architecture is fantastic; the Mole is a destination on its own; the permanent exhibit is thorough and accessible; the temporary exhibit was equal to the permanent exhibit in its ability to engage the viewer; and the neighbourhood in which the museum is located adds to the sense that this is the destination for film-lovers. This museum is a perfect blend of the light heartedness of film entertainment and the more serious study of cinema history. Juxtaposing the new and the old it creates endless delight for the visitor. I would rank it high on a best practises list for film museums. If anyone is interested in more information the website for the Mole is worth a look: www.museonazionaledelcinema.org. Members Corner: News & Announcements Shelley Arvin took a new position as Learning Resources Librarian to the Rivers Institute at Hanover College in May. She will build their library and collection, which will involve collaborating with the college library as well as meeting the international needs of the Rivers Institute. See the full press release—Arvin Joins Rivers Institute Staff as Learning Resource Librarian—at http://www.riversinstitute.org/Uploads/Pressroom/Pressroom_31.pdf. Cathy Donaldson, Library Director, Art Institute of Seattle, writes that library posters from the Art Institute of Seattle Library were mentioned in the April 1 Library Journal in the news bites section: Making LC Call Numbers Visual (see http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA512183.html). “Since publication, we’ve been getting plenty of interest from various small college libraries interested in all the posters. And, as a nice touch, Carley Moran, the student worker who did the design, graduated last quarter and took with her the Best in Show BFA portfolio award. We’re very proud of her, and the posters look grand at the end of each of our book shelves.” These posters also received a mention in Art Libraries Journal, the journal of ARLIS UK & Ireland, (2004, Vol 29 #3) in an article titled “The other pictures: stock photography in graphic design libraries.” Interested in becoming a reviewer? We have received a review copy of a recent publication from Haworth Press called Collaborative Access to Virtual Museum Collection Information: Seeing Through the Walls, edited by Bernadette G. Callery. If you would be interested in reviewing this book for an upcoming edition of the Bulletin, contact Nancy Adams at nancy@nladams.com, and I’ll get the book to you. If you have any news or announcements for the next edition of the Bulletin, please forward them to Nancy Adams at nancy@nladams.com. An Historic Cite: The Vieux Carré Survey Database By Gerald F. Patout, Jr., Head Librarian New Orleans’s historic French Quarter, or Vieux Carré, has long been the subject of much attention and intense development pressure. As the chief attraction and center of the city’s tourism industry, the Quarter is the destination for more than 18 million visitors each year and its importance in the economic mix has increased in inverse proportion to the gradual decay of the city’s non-recreational economy over the past two decades. Ultimately, the struggle to guide growth and economic tourism rationally in the Vieux Carré depends on scholarship, sound reasoning and information. For nearly forty years, a primary tool in the effort to preserve the French Quarter has been the Vieux Carré Survey, housed in the library collection of the Williams Research Center (WRC) of The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC), where it has become the most intensively used resources serviced by the library staff. This massive compendium of citations, images, maps and other data pertaining to every property in the Quarter is an invaluable source of information for preservationists and developers alike. Much of this is due to its geographic organization, in which the data is filed by square, then street, followed by block. Yet because it is an entirely paper-based entity, the Survey can be used only at the WRC and searching is limited to its current organizational arrangement. Moreover, the inherent fragility of this unique resource leaves it vulnerable to progressive and irreversible deterioration caused by constant use. With funding from the Collins C. Diboll Foundation in New Orleans, the Vieux Carré Survey Database Project has begun to convert the current paper-based Vieux Carré Survey into an electronic format, allowing it to be simultaneously accessed by multiple users via the Internet and at workstations located in the WRC reading room. More importantly, the conversion will make the survey data independent of its current organizational arrangement, thereby making it possible to present the data in ways that allow other intellectual approaches. While the existing arrangement of data by square within the survey provides the most commonly needed access mode, conversion to electronic format would allow searching and grouping of information by variables such as property owner, value and time-period. Finally, by putting the Survey into a database format, The Historic New Orleans Collection will gain a data structure that will allow other holdings to be accessed in the same, highly useful, geographic format as the Survey. The Vieux Carré Survey was originally the result of a collaborative effort between the Tulane University School of Architecture, a group of New Orleans architects, historians, members of the Louisiana Landmarks Society and other dedicated amateur scholars. Building on the work produced by the WPA and HABS in the 1930’s, the Vieux Carré Survey began, in the mid-1960’s, to create an extensive pictorial and textual index of materials pertaining to the French Quarter. Two copies of the survey were made. One copy was deposited with the Tulane School of Architecture. Its current disposition is unknown. The other was housed in the Vieux Carré in a facility that would eventually become The Historic New Orleans Collection. This copy of the Survey, now contained in 136 three-inch ring-binders at the Williams Research Center, was largely created during two separate periods. The first of these occurred from 1961 to 1966 with funding from the Schlieder Foundation, supplemented with space, supplies and some addition to the salaries by General L. Kemper Williams. This was followed by a second period of activity from 1977 through 1979, funded by Collins Diboll and The Historic New Orleans Collection. In addition to these periods of relatively intense activity, minor updates to the Survey were conducted almost continuously for a period of nearly 20 years from the late 1960’s through the late 1980’s. The Survey now documents every square of the district with citations to Notarial Archives documents, chains of title, photographs, maps and journalism. From its inception the survey has provided an indispensable service to hundreds of patrons a year at the WRC. At the same time, its size, fragility and difficulty of use make it one of the most difficult resources to service. In addition, as a paper document without external indices, much of its information is difficult to access or analyze in any order but that in which it was originally arranged. For many years the reference staff at The Collection has asked that the Survey be converted to digital form in the hopes that such a conversion would make it easier for researchers to extract more and different kinds of information. The Historic New Orleans Collection intends to create a comprehensive electronic index to geographically-oriented materials that are both held by The Historic New Orleans Collection or cited in the Vieux Carré survey. This effort involves four major phases: (1) conversion of the Vieux Carré Survey to electronic format; (2) integration of data from other materials held at the collection into the database; (3) incorporate “extra-collection” data into the database; and (4) the exporting or integration of this material into a Geographic Information System (GIS). Work on the informational side of the database was begun in April 2003. As of November 2004, 90 of the binders (out of 136) have been processed. This translates into 65 squares, 1,513 lots that include 28,771 names (with variants) and 36,616 property transactions. Support material has been included, i.e. newspaper clippings, assorted ephemera and Vieux Carré Commission architectural reviews. Once completed it will be possible, for the first time, to search by surname. Other possible search groups include notary publics and free people of color by gender. Also, photographic images are in the process of being scanned. At a later date they will be "connected" to the photographic “negative” information that has already been entered into the database. As the 1981 THNOC publication The Vieux Carré Survey states in the concluding paragraph referring to the “paper” copy of this important collection, “it is doubtful that the Louisiana Landmarks Society members could have envisioned, back in 1959, the collection of material that would grow out of their pioneering efforts; indeed, it is still growing, and will do so in perpetuity.” It is now fair to conclude the electronic copy of this monumental and valuable asset will bring a new and more useful dimension to this body of information and hopefully, more attention to one’s of the country’s most colorful historic neighborhoods. Preliminary Program for 2006 Annual Conference in Baltimore
8:00 p.m. to midnight Developing a digital collection, like any collection development, is a series of choices. Using ResCarta standards and software, the goal of this course is to provide a working knowledge of the abundance of “best” practices and commitment to working with an accepted subset of open standards for creating digital collections. Participants will learn to scan images and then add these images to existing collections so that the images can be searched as one collection, either through metadata searches or word searches. Speaker: John Sarnowski, Director, ResCarta Foundation Presented by: Museums, Arts and Humanities Division
9:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. (The actual session/presentation
should till 11:00; those who want to stay for coffee and further discussions with Mr. Harvey are welcome to do so.) With Baltimore’s magnificent George Peabody Library as a setting, author Miles Harvey will talk about his book, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, the story of a curious crime spree that came to an end in 1995. Do come listen to Mr. Harvey tell his remarkable story about Gilbert Bland, the most prolific map thief in American history. What really makes this event so special is that Mr. Bland began his crime at the Peabody! Moderated by: Gerald Patout, Head Librarian, Historic New Orleans Collection Presented by: Museums, Arts and Humanities Division; Geography and Maps section of Social Science Division 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Join MAHD for their always entertaining and informative book author luncheon! Rafael Alvarez is a home-town boy who just loves Baltimore. The former Baltimore Sun reporter is indeed funny, insightful, colorful and very passionate about his writing, not to mention he is an advocate for all kinds of libraries. Alvarez is a rare treat!
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. (changed to meet travel requirements of DC presenters traveling to Baltimore) Bringing together the important parts for a library digitization project is key to the success of any project and certainly having funds is an essential part of the process. Representatives from major library grant-making organizations will discuss funding for digital projects. Panelists will include representatives from IMLS, NEH, and NHPRC, discussing their specific grants and important opportunities for special libraries to capitalize upon. Presented by: Museums, Arts and Humanities Division 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Although the Web is for everyone with online access, many users do not consider the basics of aesthetic design as applied to Web sites. This session will look at how aesthetics affect people as they traverse the Web. Several theorists concerned with the human need to work with well-designed products have concluded that aesthetics matter. An aesthetic theorist, a usability specialist and a Web designer discuss and illuminate this issue. Presented by: Education Division, Museums, Arts and Humanities Division 1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Take another step onto the digital superhighway . . . so you’ve got a digitization grant — now what? Get up close and personal as these digital practitioners and panelists discuss what they did with their grants and the successes and pitfalls of digitization projects. Panelists/Speakers: Julie Beamer, Database and Digital Collections Manager, Virginia Historical Society Presented by: Museums, Arts and Humanities Division
9:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. Information Strategist and HistoryFactory.com guru Jason Dressel will address the idea that all special librarians should become attuned to managing their organization’s historical and cultural assets, and maybe not just to meet the event needs of a glitzy art opening, a special corporate anniversary, a new product exhibition, or any or other special marketing event. Historic and cultural institutional information is no longer just the domain of museum librarians. Come hear some real creative solutions to unleashing “the power of the past!” Speaker: Jason Dressel, The History Factory Presented by: Museums, Arts and Humanities Division 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. MAHD has saved the best for last . . . join us for a tour of a spectacular and unique national repository for artworks created by self-taught artists. The building’s architecture is an artistic creation unto itself, winning many international and historical awards for design. The June 2006 exhibit, Race Class Gender = Character is a must see . . . and the gift shop is not to be missed! Presented by: Museums, Arts and Humanities Division
8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Presented by: Military Librarians Division; Museums, Arts and Humanities Division The DMAH Bulletin is published four times a year by the Museums, Arts and Humanities Division of the Special Libraries Association. Deadlines for submission of advertisements and materials are as follows:
The Special Libraries Association assumes no responsibility for the statements and opinions advanced by contributors to the association’s publications. Editorial views do not necessarily represent the official position of the Special Libraries Association. Acceptance of an advertisement does not imply endorsement of the product by the Special Libraries Association.
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