Friday, December 17, 2010

SAA Pre-conference Workshop

Are you considering attending the upcoming March 2011 conference?  If so, there is now an additional incentive to spend your weekend taking advantage of professional development opportunities in beautiful Bloomington, IN!  The Indiana University Society of American Archivists Student Chapter is excited to announce that we will be co-sponsoring the Society of American Archivists’ Visual Literacy in Photograph Collections Workshop to precede our upcoming March conference.

The daylong workshop—scheduled from 9:00-5:00pm on Friday, March 4, 2011—will be taught by instructor Nicolette A. Bromberg, Visual Materials Curator at the University of Washington.  A fantastically discounted $92 early bird registration fee is available to registered SAA student members who sign up before February 4, 2011.  What a steal!

To quote the SAA website,

This workshop provides methods to gain information from photographs and to understand how this information can be applied in a practical manner to help manage, arrange, and describe collections more effectively and for researchers to extract information. If you’ve attended SAA’s “Understanding Photographs” workshop, this is your next step! This workshop adds more concepts that are important for understanding the intellectual and physical nature of photographs. Incorporating these concepts into daily practice can have practical and economical benefit for the archivist and provide better service to the researcher. Learn to understand the photograph as artifact, visual literacy, and their application to photograph collection management and research uses.

Upon completing this workshop, you’ll:
·         Have examined visual literacy in-depth and learned to apply this information in practice always to arrange and describe photograph collections;
·         Know about the importance of the concept of object and image in collection management and the difference between physical order and intellectual order;
·         Comprehend the intellectual and social nature of photographs;
·         Understand the photographic messages, the complex collective life of photographs, and how the photographic information can be obscured or changed over time; and
·         Be able to apply this knowledge to managing photo collections to save time and money.

The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for students and beginning professionals to gain a deeper, insightful perspective on archival photograph collections—a topic not frequently of focus in graduate school curricula.  Prior attendance in the more basic “Understand Photographs” SAA workshop is not required for registration.

To read a more detailed report on the workshop—including further registration and fee information, testimonials from prior participants, and an hourly breakdown of the workshop schedule—please visit the SAA website here.

If you plan to register, please remember that the workshop can accommodate only 30 participants.  We advise you to reserve your spot as soon as possible.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Call for Papers

Preserving our Cultural Heritage
A Conference for Students and Beginning Professionals on Archives, Rare Books, and Special Collections

March 5-6, 2011
Bloomington, Indiana

Indiana University’s student chapter of the Society of American Archivists is proud to announce our third conference for students and beginning professionals, to be held on Saturday March 5-Sunday March 6, 2011 at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

If you are a graduate student in a library science, archives, or rare books program or have entered the profession within the previous three years, we invite you to submit your papers on topics related to archives, rare books, or special collections for presentation at the conference.  The conference theme of “Preserving our Cultural Heritage” can be interpreted broadly; we welcome papers on diverse topics within the field.  In addition to paper sessions, the two-day conference will include a workshop and tours of Indiana University special collections and repositories.

Each paper session will be an hour long and will include two presenters. Each presenter will have approximately 20 to 25 minutes to speak, and the session will conclude with a ten to fifteen minute period for questions and answers.

To be considered as a presenter, please submit your paper (or, if your paper is not yet complete, an abstract of 150 to 200 words and a working title) to iusaaconference@gmail.com by Friday, December 3, 2010. Along with your paper or abstract, please include your name, email address, institutional affiliation, and any audio/visual needs you may have.

The papers will be discussed and voted on in a blind judging process and you will receive an acceptance or rejection by the end of December. If you have only submitted an abstract, your acceptance will be conditional. You will be required to submit the completed paper by mid-February to have your acceptance finalized.

If your paper is accepted, you will be sent a more detailed registration form. At that time, you will also be asked to submit a registration fee of $30 to cover the meals provided during the conference. More details about meals, accommodations available in Bloomington, and other logistics will also be provided at this time.  For more information on our previous conference, please visit http://www.indiana.edu/~saarchiv/gradconference2010.html, and feel free to send any questions you may have to iusaaconference@gmail.com.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!