Art Libraries Society of North America 31st Annual Conference

Citation

Vecchiola, R.M. (2003), "Art Libraries Society of North America 31st Annual Conference", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920fac.001

Art Libraries Society of North America 31st Annual Conference

Rina M. Vecchiola

The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) held its 31st Annual Conference from March 20-26, 2003 in Baltimore, Maryland. Along with several sessions devoted to exploring the unique arts and architecture of Baltimore and Maryland, many sessions at the annual meeting of ARLIS/NA focused on the use of technology in managing and delivering visual arts information. Sessions addressed the Web as a tool in the discovery of arts information, the complex process involved in the electronic delivery of high quality images, and the new issues raised regarding copyright in a digital environment.

The session "The invisible Web and more" was presented by Laura Gordon-Murane, Intranet Manager at the Bureau of National Affairs, who explained the difference between what is available "on the Web" vs "via the Web." The speaker identified the limits of Web search engines, which search the "Visible Web." These limits include such examples as the 30-45-day time lag it takes for pages to be indexed, indexing only the first 100k of the page, non-HTML text being hard to find, multiple formats not always bring indexed, and dynamically generated pages not being indexed. "Invisible Web" sources will lead the user to specialized content, specialized search tools, increased precision and recall, authoritative content, and unique information, and are therefore essential in the discovery of visual arts information. Invisible Web sources are used when one is familiar with a subject, needs a specific answer, and is looking for timely and authoritative information. Many examples of Invisible Web sources were given and these are linked on the presentation Web site: www.tinyurl.com/7ws4

At the session titled "A picture's worth a thousand words: art images, copyright, and e-journals," panelists described the difficulties authors, publishers and database providers face in making electronic access to art publications available on a larger scale than is currently seen. Eve Sinaiko, the Director of Publications at the College Art Association, which publishes two major art journals, explained the struggle scholarly authors face in having images reproduced to accompany their text. She noted that the rights to images are expensive and that acquiring rights is increasingly left up to the scholarly author who must then determine whether the images are in the public domain or which museum or private entity holds those rights. Cost is determined by the size of the reproduction, whether it is in color and/or used as a cover image and by how wide the distribution will be (North America vs world). But these traditional models for determining rights costs are not applicable in the digital Web world.

The second panelist, Heidi McGregor, Director of Publisher Relations at JSTOR, focused on the incorporation of high quality images in the electronic product, JSTOR. JSTOR is "an archive of scholarly journals" with a responsibility for stewardship of those journals over time and a responsibility to ensure collections are comprehensive and complete. Art History materials pose digitization challenges because of the high volume of images used to accompany texts, which require copyright clearance and special electronic preservation attention. After consulting with the Digital Library Federation and reviewing Cornell's Illustrated Book Study, JSTOR decided on an image capture requirement of 300dpi, TIFF format. JSTOR's goal is to display high quality images in context. In order to meet this goal they have created a process whereby a page is scanned to capture coordinates of images, then the images are scanned separately using the image capture requirement, and finally a composite page is created using the separate scans. Image captions will also be captured and eventually searchable. JSTOR will release seven art historical journals from three to five years ago in the fall of 2003, which use the composite page process.

In a lively debate regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright and Copyright Term Extension Acts, Arnold P. Lutzker of Lutzker and Lutzker LLP in Washington, DC and Allan R. Adler of the Association of American Publishers in Washington, DC presented opposing points of view on the legal merits of the Acts. Lutzker supported the perspective of libraries and educational institutions in his advocacy of "fair use" as an engine of creativity and for expanding not limiting the amount of materials in the public domain, calling for publishers to not contest every use of their content – thumbnails, for example. Adler, alternatively, views copyright as an agent of free expression and feels that the DMCA begins to address the problem of instantaneous creation of exact copies that exists now with digital technologies and harms the interests of content providers. Lutzker and Adler's debate helped attendees to better understand the issues concerning copyright and fair use in a digital environment.

Many of the proceedings of the Art Libraries Society of North America 31st Annual Conference can be found at: www.arlisna.org/conf2003/Conftoc.html The next ARLIS National meeting will be held in New York, NY from April 15-20, 2004. Check the ARLIS Web site for more details at: www.arlisna.org/

Rina M. Vecchiola (rvecchio@uci.edu) is a Research Librarian for Art History, Studio Art, Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California, USA.