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.