ARLIS National Coordination Committee Annual Report 2015
Membership
2015 saw significant changes to the NCC membership. Carole Holden retired from her post at the British Library as Head of American and Australasian Studies and left the NCC in February 2015 following many years’ dedicated service as member and Secretary of the NCC. Paula Cuccurullo, representative for the Scottish Visual Arts Group stepped down from the committee in August 2015, and out of the Library world altogether, to work for Owen Thompson, her local MP. We extend our thanks to Paula and to Carole for their fantastic contributions. Incoming members were as follows:
· Elizabeth James (Senior Librarian Collections and Documentation) National Art Library, V&A took over as Secretary to the NCC
· Jayne Roberts (Assistant Librarian) Leeds College of Art, took over as the corresponding member for LALIC
· Chris Michaelides (Curator, Italian & Modern Greek Section) British Library took over as the BL representative
· Duncan Chappell (Academic Liaison Librarian) Glasgow School of Art, replaced Paula as the Scottish Visual Arts Group representative
· Fleur Soper (Collections Knowledge Manager at The National Archives, Archives Sector Development) took over as the TNA representative. Fleur has been leading on TNA’s ‘Archiving the Arts’ initiative since 2012.
Meetings
Three meetings were held during the year on: 25/2/15 (British Library); 01/07/15 (National Art Library); 11/11/15 (British Architectural Library).
Strategic Alliances/collaborative storage
· Elizabeth James became a full member of the IFLA Art Libraries Section at the IFLA Annual Congress, 2015 held in Cape Town.
· Five DCMS-funded art museum libraries in London have been discussing common concerns around collections mapping and storage solutions, with a view to exploring the potential for collaboration. Experiences of offsite storage have been shared, and the group has met for presentations from Restore, the facility at Upper Heyford in partnership with the National Conservation Service, and from the British Library, about their ambitious plan for a UK Printed Collections Management Hub at Boston Spa. Several of these libraries’ directors have sent the BL letters of support for the latter project and stakeholder meetings are planned for Spring 2016 which Jane Bramwell (Tate) and Elizabeth James (NAL) will attend. Among themselves, the DCMS group currently considers that there is in principle potential for collaboration in deduplication, research and digitisation of auction sale catalogues, a voluminous and often uncatalogued resource in libraries of this kind. The libraries currently meeting are: National Art Library (V&A), National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate, Wallace Collection.
UK Research Reserve
· UKRR is a HEFCE-funded collaborative initiative aimed at promoting a coordinated approach between Higher Education Libraries and the British to manage the long-term sustainability of retaining low-use print journals. Darryl Yang, the UKRR Manager was invited to the Committee’s November meeting to talk about Phase 3 of the project, a detailed proposal for which is currently in preparation. The NCC will keep a watching brief on developments.
Future of Art Bibliography (FAB) and the Art Discovery Group Catalogue (ADGC)
· NCC continued to monitor developments with this initiative which had it roots in the cessation of the Getty Research Institute’s support for the Bibliography of the History of Art. The Art Discovery Project emerged from FAB meetings between 2010 and December 2013 and a desire by the group to enhance the federated search service which had been offered by artlibraries.net since its inception in 1999 and re-launch in 2007.
· With support from the USA’s Samuel H Kress Foundation and working with OCLC, a new subject-specific research tool The Art Discovery Group Catalogue https://artlibraries.on.worldcat.org/discovery was launched in May 2014 and Wendy Fish (a member of the ADGC Steering Group) attended the 2015 ARLIS/NA conference in Fort Worth to present a paper on the new service. Further information can be found about the project on the ADGC website http://artdiscovery.net/
· Artlibraries.net was closed on 31/12/15.
Arlis.net
· Artlis.net is a cooperative project of ARLIS UK & Ireland, providing an online union catalogue of serials in member libraries, together with a directory of institutions. Both originated in print products dating back to the early days of ARLIS, when it was far more difficult for libraries with complementary needs and resources to find out about and be in touch with each other. These resources served British art librarians and their users well, but today they are largely superseded by other services and the transformation of the information landscape on the Web. At its meeting in July 2014, a small subgroup of the NCC, joined by Joseph Ripp from the Cataloguing & Classification Committee, met to consider the implications for smaller, less well-resourced libraries, of closing the service.
· The issue was discussed again at NCC’s final meeting of 2016 where it was agreed that the service should be closed with member libraries who have not already done so being recommended to join SUNCAT. A statement outlining the reasons for the decision along with the benefits of SUNCAT would be drafted for consideration by Council in 2016.
Scottish Visual Arts Group
· The Scottish Visual Arts Group represents librarians and information providers from visual arts libraries, museums, galleries and other institutions in Scotland. We are an affiliated group of SCURL, the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries, and report to the NCC Committee of ARLIS. We are committed to the dissemination of art information and the exchange of ideas, and primarily act as a forum for professional sharing and support with a strong practical emphasis. We maintain a JISCMail list, which is open to non-reporting members, along with a new @scotvisualarts Twitter feed.
· 2015 has proved a busy year for SVAG. At our June meeting at Glasgow School of Art we celebrated our 20th birthday, having been founded in 1995. Our second meeting was held in December at Edinburgh Central Library.
· This year SVAG launched a new dedicated website at https://scottishvisualartsgroup.wordpress.com/ to showcase our activities to the sector and to the wider public. Our new site includes a full directory of our member institutions, as well as redacted minutes from 2000 to the present. Our major initiative for 2016 will be a cross-sectoral directory of artists’ books collections across Scotland, with the aim of improving the discoverability of these collections for researchers. A website has already been established at https://artistsbooksinscotland.wordpress.com/ and will be populated with collection descriptors in early 2016.