ARLIS/NA 43rd Annual Conference

Speakers:

Building Bridges of Collaboration: Spotlight on Latin American Art — Isabel Ayres Maringelli, Chief of Library and Museum Archives, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Ranieli Piccinini Machado Shinohara, Librarian, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Class, Not Mass: A New Database for Art and Museum Libraries, Archives, and Related Institutions — Sybille Hentze, Chief Librarian, Albertina, Vienna, Austria
Andrea Neidhöfer, Chief of Archive, basis wien, Vienna, Austria

The Virtual Monastic Library of Abbey Lorsch: Potential and Challenges of an International Digitization Project — Alexandra Büttner, M.A., Heidelberg University Library, Germany, Heidelberg, Germany

A Local or a Worldwide Libraries Network? — Fernando Corona, Library Coordinator, National Museum of Art, México City, México

Moderator:
Sylvia Roberts, Liaison Librarian for Communication & Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC and ARLIS/NA Board Liaison to the International Relations Committee

The arteLA group is an example of how to break the old, but still present, frontier between countries in Latin America. Isabel Ayres Maringelli and Ranieli Piccinini Machado Shinohara will talk about their goal to disseminate Latin American Art Information Resources by strengthening collaboration among Latin American Art Librarians and to establish collaborative relationships with other continents.

Andrea Neidhöfer and Sybille Hentze will discuss a big problem with online directories — in this case, a directory of art institutions — which is keeping them up-to-date while administering data like addresses, opening hours, staff changes, or other developments in regard to user modalities. User experience has demonstrated that the larger the number of institutions a directory contains and the wider its geographic scope, the less precise and reliable the information it offers. One runs the risk of losing users, who will not use the platform again. This is why librarians have made deliberate selections, in terms of geography (Austria) and discipline (the visual arts), when filling their database. They believe that limitations with regard to personnel and time, both of which are indispensable for administering a database, are necessary in order to improve the quality of a database and, above all, sustain it in the long run.

Through the international digitization project “Bibliotheca Laureshamensis — digital,” the dispersed library collection of the UNESCO-World Heritage Site Abbey Lorsch has been reconstructed online. Alexandra Büttner will present a paper that focuses on the potential and challenges of virtually reuniting medieval manuscripts from institutions as far apart as Los Angeles and Bucharest.

One of our problems in a contemporary globalized world is the aim of concentrating resources in large spaces that simulate big warehouses. Fernando Corona will talk about a similar thing that is happening in the world of libraries. With the propensity to concentrate everything, we forget that a network is exactly the opportunity of interconnections.