VRA's Summer Educational Institute

SALS Member Erin McCall recently attended the Visual Resources Association's Summer Educational Institute and has this to say about her experience:

    
       Meeting on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, about 45 professionals and students came together for a week in June at ARLIS/NA's and VRA's 2012 Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management. Topics for this year's institute included intellectual property rights, embedded metadata, and digital imaging. Each topic spanned the length of a day, with afternoons devoted to the practice of the theories discussed that morning. Staff members at the Henry Ford Museum also presented their highs and lows of digitizing, including the pitfalls of too few storage capacities, as an exemplar for managing large digitization projects. On the final day, a newly implemented ThinkCamp provided the opportunity for attendees to discuss important topics on the role of the individual in the workplace. Two sessions offered three topic choices each, ranging from marketing and outreach to demonstrating value, instruction to managing students, and even professional development in the external world. This provided a great opportunity to learn what others are doing in their institutions and whether it has or has not worked. In fact, for much of the week, SEI provided a doorway for professionals and students with varied backgrounds to meet over the unifying interest in visual resources.

University of Michigan Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library


       My time at SEI provided me with the practical knowledge to working and networking as a future professional. Several of the participants had been working in the field for many years, attending the week-long institute as a refresher, and for some an introduction, to image management in anticipation of a new digitizing project at their fine art libraries, museums, and even medical institution. Students and new professionals shared their common anxiety over finding a job, but each bringing with them a unique background and insight to what has succeeded so far. As my first professional development experience, I took away a great deal of knowledge from the curriculum, but more importantly, I gained a great deal of confidence in my own career-path. SEI provides an excellent opportunity for students of library science and museum studies to expand their skill-sets. As creation and use of digital images increases, management of those images will also increase. SEI offers the chance to see what has already been done for the purpose of managing images properly and what we will be seeing in the long-term.

For more information on SEI, go to http://sei.vrafoundation.org/index.html
A useful link for viewing the embedded metadata of images uploaded to the Internet: http://regex.info/exif.cgi

If you are interested in seeing the materials used in the courses, email me at eemccall@indiana.edu

Notes From a Summer Intern (part 1)

Entrance to the Thomas J. Watson Library

Notes From a Summer Intern (part 1)

The Search:
Students in the dual MLS/MA (in the History of Art) program at IU, are required to complete an internship in an art library. Although there are a number of exciting places to pursue such an internship while in Bloomington, I elected to complete my internship over the summer and out of town. I wanted to take the opportunity to learn about a new library and see what librarianship is like outside of the university bubble. Since I have family in New York City I knew I could spend the summer in the city without the difficulties of subletting, etc. Going into the process of searching for an internship I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to find a placement in a NYC art library during the summer months. I started by generating a list of art libraries within the geographic area I was interested. Of these, only the art museum libraries seemed to have established internship programs with applications and deadlines. For those institutions that did not have an internship program I sent an email introducing myself, explaining my interests and inquiring about possibilities. I quickly heard back from almost every librarian I contacted. For the most part they thanked me for my inquiry but stated that they did not take summer interns (many of these were academic libraries who deal with a much smaller student population in the summer). With that knowledge I focused my efforts on the museum applications. After two interviews, I was informed that I had been accepted into the Summer Internship for Graduate Students at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Internship:
The Summer Internship for Graduate Students at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is run out of the museum education office as part of the larger paid internship program. Interns spend the first week together and each subsequent monday in a series of museum seminars, Tuesdays-Fridays are spent in individual departments (my department being The Thomas J. Watson Library). In addition to departmental duties, graduate student interns conduct two gallery talks in their area of study over the course of the summer. In the Watson Library I work primarily with the cataloging and processing teams. Most of my responsibilities/projects/duties are in processing: I receive items returning from the bindery, process items for off-site storage, and work with different staff members as they re-classify items from different departmental libraries (the Met has 20+ departmental libraries scattered throughout the museum).

One of the many departmental libraries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

At this point, I’m just about halfway done with my 10 week internship. So far, I’ve really enjoyed being at the Watson and participating in the summer internship program. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many wonderful and friendly people, including the staff and my fellow interns. In addition, I’ve been able to experience both the library and museum from an inside perspective.

More to come: part 2, the second half of my intern experience.


Useful Facts:
- The Met accepts 40 paid interns each summer (½ are graduate and the other ½ are undergraduates). For more see:goo.gl/a7DBT
- The Watson library itself has around 40 intern/volunteers at any given time.
- Both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art also have internship programs and offer a library placement option.


If you have a specific question relating to my internship or more generally about art library internship opportunities in NYC feel free to write me at: erothkat@indiana.edu

- Esther Roth-Katz