MinutesPresent:
1. Introductions and apologiesApologies: Grace Cochrane, Elizabeth Ellis, Karen Johnson, Paul Kelvin, Catherine Hammond, Dermott McCaul, John Thompson, Alan Ventress, Michael Watson 2. Objectives of the ForumJan Fullerton briefly outlined the process leading up to the forum. The University of New South Wales and ARLIS/ANZ sought the Library's assistance to convene a meeting to discuss a range of issues concerned with access to visual arts resources, and have provided help in conducting the preliminary survey and organising the meeting. It is hoped the Forum will raise issues of general concern, suggest courses of action, and assign responsibility for making progress on some of these issues. 3. 2003 SurveyThe results of the 2003 survey were described briefly. It is known that some significant collections were not included in the results, either because the holding institution did not respond to the survey, or the collection resides outside a library. Action: The NLA to place the results of its survey of visual arts libraries on its web site with a link from the ARLIS/ANZ website. 4. The National Bibliographic DatabaseJin Whittington introduced this item. Her organisation, the Art Gallery of South Australia, is an enthusiastic NBD user and finds Kinetica membership very cost-effective. Despite having only a small staff, the library has its holdings on Kinetica, and has not found the ILL workload unacceptable. If more visual arts libraries participated in the NBD and ILL the work would be distributed even more. With the Kinetica payments scheme, financial tracking is very simple and the revenue earned helps pay for their own borrowings. AGSA finds their cataloguing hit rate on the NBD is around 60%. The library tends to keep and catalogue many overseas items others might discard, but these 'cultural refugees' will often be the only copy of the work in Australia. Jin referred to earlier work of the Australian Library Collections Task Force and the surveys of uncatalogued collections in Australian libraries. There needs to be a concerted effort to prioritise and process these collections. (Note: summary results from these surveys are online at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/alctf/nbdsurvey.html and the original survey forms are still held at the NLA) There are still barriers to NBD contribution in terms of :
Cathy Pilgrim from Kinetica indicated that the National Library is happy to work with individual libraries to facilitate their efficient use of Kinetica, and reassured those present that Kinetica can deal with data in a wide variety of formats and from many systems. She also said that it is useful to include holdings in Kinetica even for items which are not available for loan. Entries in the Australian Libraries Gateway can be used to provide details of loan policies and restrictions. She drew attention to the proposed cataloguing workflow workshops being planned for several states and in conjunction with the 2004 ALIA conference. She also offered to explore the possibility of running one of these workshops in conjunction with the ARLIS/ANZ conference planned for early September. Action: Kinetica and ARLIS/ANZ collaborate on designing a workshop on cataloguing prior to the ARLIS/ANZ Conference in September to address the following issues:
Margaret Shaw asked if Kinetica can accept SCIPIO records (sales catalogues database at RLG). It would also help many libraries if Kinetica could help with a format for collection level records for guerilla materials. Cathy Pilgrim said Kinetica would look at developing templates for such records, at both collection and item level. Action: Kinetica to investigate provision of the SCIPIO database from the Research Libraries Group as a core service to increase the amount of copy cataloguing data available to visual arts libraries. In response to a question about the operation of the Harvester software, Cathy replied that the records need to be made available for ftp collection. At present this project is in pilot mode, but going well. The NLA is aware that not everyone has MARC data, but is keen to be able to take in data in various formats. Mal Booth added that OAI has assisted their contribution of data to PictureAustralia, and the metadata harvester worked well. Jan Fullerton emphasised that it is important institutions adhere to established standards and don't invent their own data formats. Andrew Wells indicated that ARLIZ/ANZ would think about convening a workshop looking at barriers to data contribution. Jasmine Cameron suggested that the NLA may be able to organise to test the harvester with one or two arts libraries as a demonstrator project. 5. FRBR (Functional requirements for Bibliographic Records)Deirdre Kioorgard gave a brief explanation of FRBR and its benefits. Kinetica is experimenting with FRBR, and experience with FRBR will influence the redevelopment project. Margaret Shaw volunteered to distribute more widely the slides presented on the topic at the recent ARLIS/NA New York conference. 6. Australian Libraries GatewayLast year a focus group of NSW ARLIS/ANZ members discussed ALG to see if it's usefulness to visual arts libraries could be improved. It was apparent in those discussions that many of these libraries were frustrated by the difficulty of entering or finding information about guerilla resources, because ALG is not good at exposing these collections, which are very important in the visual arts sector. A series of specific suggestions had been provided to the National Library. Cathy Pilgrim indicated that a redevelopment of ALG is underway, and the suggestions from the ARLIS/ANZ group will be considered as part of that redevelopment. Improvements to search functionality and the indexing of the data are planned. She said it is also important for the participant libraries to keep their entries up-to-date. 7. Indexing and databasesMargaret Blackmore said that the location and identification of guerilla resources is difficult if these resources are not catalogued onto the NBD. They are frequently not catalogued or indexed at all, or are listed in inhouse resources. APAIS is not a good option because it does not provide good coverage of the visual arts field. AustArt is the most widely used database, and is widely known and easily available. Other databases do not index these journals in depth. The database system is not user-friendly, but it is free to for users. There are a number of database projects underway, some of which will produce publicly-accessible databases. Margaret Shaw indicated that the Artex database is being updated, and this work should be completed this year. Susan Schmocker said the Art Gallery of NSW had used money made available by the Gallery's Friends to establish the Archibald database. It is now a web-accessible InMagic database. Several functions a year are organised to raise money to keep the project going. Many of the state libraries have large collections of resources, and a number are trying to make records for those collections available online. Jill More said some sort of portal may be a solution, but there are many hurdles, including finding a host, identifying appropriate software, guaranteeing funding. It is probably not something an individual visual arts library could manage. Andrew Wells stated that it would be good if AustArt could become a cooperative venture. Users find it difficult if information they want is scattered around a variety of small databases run by separate organisations. At this stage there are no linkages between the various available resources. The British Library had taken the step of creating one large database from many smaller ones. This was the best solution for the clients, and most Australian visual arts libraries producing small databases would be happy for their data to be harvested and made available. Roger Butler said it must also be remembered that there are a number of indexes outside libraries. Jan Fullerton said there needs to be a group working on these issues. Andrew Wells offered to assist. Action: ARLIS/ANZ and the National Library to work together on establishing a working group to address the issues outlined in the Indexing and Databases paper presented at the Forum. Issues include sustainability, coverage, retrospective conversion, discovery, availability. The feasibility of creating a portal or gateway for Australian visual arts resources could also be addressed by this working group. The working group should aim to report on these issues by May 2005. 8. DigitisationAccess to Australian art is problematic, particularly since many agencies previously producing art, design and architecture slide sets no longer do so. The need is for resources such as 3D views of works and panoramas, as well as standard still images, and navigation tools such as zooming and rotation. Neil Hinsch put forward the following proposals to the Forum: 1. That PictureAustralia assume the role of providing a home for the work of individual artists, and allow individual artists, designers and architects to place their respective images in the database. 2. That PictureAustralia and NAVA work together to develop a copyright information portal to manage rights information ( preferably a virtual registry identifying intellectual property rights in individual artworks to ease access to images and probably reduce rights clearance costs to participants). Jan Fullerton agreed that the National Library would look more closely at the proposals, but reminded the Forum that the Library is not responsible for copyright matters. Tamara Winikoff suggested that VISCOPY would need to be involved. It was suggested that PictureAustralia should include a field for rights management data, and that it would be useful to be able to search for images that are copyright-cleared.(Ed. Note. PA data already includes a rights field) The high cost of teaching-quality images from some PictureAustralia providers was raised. Mal Booth and Jan Fullerton said that the War Memorial and the National Library were prepared to look at the issue of pricing and availability of images for teaching purposes. Other providers might also be open to such approaches. Action: ARLIS/ANZ and the National Library to work together on establishing a working group to address the issues outlined in the papers on digitisation presented at the Forum. Issues include metadata, technical standards, rights management, shared effort, and educational uses of digitised images. The working group should aim to report on these issues by May 2005. Action: The National Library to investigate incorporating rights management data into the metadata format used in PictureAustralia. 9. ConsortiaWhile some libraries in the visual arts field are already members of consortia, quite a number are not. The meeting discussed briefly the various consortia already operating, and noted that as it is not cost effective to form small consortia, one solution may perhaps be expansion of the CASL Consortium to include some of the art libraries. Jin Whittington said she would be willling to participate in the CASL Consortium on a trial basis. Action: The CASL Consortium to investigate including the Art Gallery of South Australia in the negotiations for Grove Art Online as a test case for involving small institutions. Margy Burn indicated that the National Library is now seeking to include remote access as a condition in new electronic licensing agreements. Margaret Shaw said that libraries in Commonwealth agencies have access to APAFT through the AGLIN consortium deal. 10. Working relationships among visual arts librariesPaul Bentley spoke to the meeting about the current status of ARLIS/ANZ. The organisation is down to about a hundred members, most of whom are at middle management level, not in decision-making positions. Susan Schmocker said that at last count the number of members was 125. Jill More said that despite the number of members, the society is struggling, and needs to work with other groups. ARLIS/ANZ has a strong role to play in communications. One means of doing this was to ensure the new website linked to the new databases others had mentioned as being under development. Paul Bentley said there needed to be closer liaison with groups such as PASIG and IAML. Action: ARLIS/ANZ review its purpose, goals and activities over the next twelve months 11. LearnscopeStephen O'Brien introduced his paper on Learnscope. The project is to run until November 2004, and will enable participants to share their experiences in accessing and using a range of online services for teaching/learning purposes. Andrew Wells encouraged all Forum delegates to contact Stephen to join the project. Action: All attendees of the Forum to promulgate information about the LearnScope project at the Hunter Institute in order to stimulate development on an online community of practice in digitisation of images for educational uses. 12. Online Dictionary of Australian ArtistsAndrew Wells spoke to this item. A project proposal for ARC
funding is in preparation. Partners in the project are the National Library,
National Gallery, Art Gallery of NSW, State Library of NSW, Sydney University,
Charles Darwin University and the University of NSW. The anticipated time frame
is three years. Andrew Wells summarised the action items coming out of the Forum. Action: A second Visual Arts Forum to be held in May 2005 |
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