I rarely teach with Powerpoint, but wanted to have visual material that represented my ideas and that engaged the students during my introductory talk. I took cue from my yoga class to spend some time at the beginning of the class giving a type of “pep talk” about what it was we, as a class, were about to embark on.

While I was composing my session, it occurred to me that when I’m teaching students about research, I’m really teaching them about curiosity – what it means to be curious, why they should be curious and how to act on their curiosity. I started my talk with the students by addressing that same concept. [I’ve illustrated this post with various slides from the presentation. You can watch and download the entire presentation at the end of this post.]

Slides 2 – 5: Illustrating Curiosity

In an effort to illustrate what I meant by curiosity, and to start them thinking about visual representations of concepts, I showed images of different ways to represent curiosity. As I clicked through the “Be Curious.” slides, I talked about the different ways to define what it means to be curious and the different ways in which you can illustrate those definitions.

Slide 7: Why be Curious

Slid 7 is animated and the images appear one at a time starting from the bottom right with Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope poster and working to the left, then up to the book cover of Graphic Design, moving right to Art in the Streets, then Art of Obama and ending with the headlines about the copyright case of Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster. During this slide I spoke about reasons why you would want to be curious. I used this slide to illustrate how curiosity can help you contextualize objects and give them depth. With curiosity you can discover the history of objects, learn about their influences and possibly find relationships between them and your own work.

For this slide I needed to start with an image I knew the students would recognize. The starting image also needed to be something I knew I could connect in an obvious way to other images. I was not going to talk about the images, so the connections had to speak for themselves. The bottom row are objects that demonstrate a sort of history of image making and the top row are resources about the objects.

Slid 8: Utilize Resources

From this slide I link to the image databases found in an art research guide I created. I demonstrated the free online image database Compfight.com, and our Head of Special Collections demonstrated searching images in our in-house image database. I used this opportunity to briefly talk about utilizing all resources available to them, whether they be Google or lectures, or professors or peers or the library. Different resources will connect you to different pieces of information.

Slide 9: Practice. Practice. Practice.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice drives our curiosity. The more we use something and the more we practice with it, the more we understand what it can do for us, and the more we understand how we can make it work for us. There is no level of perfection in information seeking, only levels of improvement.

Little did I know that the next reading assignment scheduled for the class was and essay entitled “Curiosity Cabinets, Museums, and Universities” by E. Bruce Robertson from the book, Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation. Two weeks after this session I spoke with the students more about developing a vocabulary for researching.

I’m curious to know about what you do to teach students about research.

I am pleased to announce that a book published earlier this year by the Maryland Institute College of Art has been awarded the Arline Custer Memorial Award for 2011 by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC).

MICA: Making History / Making Art by Douglas L. Frost

About the Book:

Thus begins the story of present-day Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and the text of MICA: Making History / Making Art by Douglas L. Frost. The book utilizes hundreds of documents—texts and images—from sources held in the MICA Archives at the Decker Library & Media Resources Collection and in other collections in Baltimore and beyond.

From its roots as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, the College’s history spans the great advances in technology of the Industrial Revolution to the fast-paced, ever changing technology of the Digital Age. This resilient institution endured the upheavals of Civil, World and Cold wars, the Great Fire of Baltimore and the Great Depression, the politically tumultuous Sixties and the sobering realities of the 21st century—and not only survived but thrived. The threads of MICA’s history are interwoven with those of America itself, with links to historical and cultural icons including Noah Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Louis Kahn, Alistair Cooke, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Rauschenberg.

MICA’s nearly two-century history is told through 336 pages of flowing narrative and more than 450 images. The layers of history, from 1826 through the present and looking into the future, are written by Vice President for Development Emeritus Douglas L. Frost, who undertook this extensive research project upon his 2006 retirement after 40 years of service to the College, in the course of which he became the school’s de facto historian.

Opening essays for MICA: Making History / Making Art have been written by Baltimore Museum of Art Director Doreen Bolger, 1976 alumnus Jeff Koons, President Fred Lazarus, and Walters Art Museum Director Gary Vikan. The oversized, full-color, hard-cover, Smyth-bound book—an artwork in itself—was designed in the Baltimore office of international design firm Pentagram by MICA faculty Abbott Miller and alumnus Jeremy Hoffman (2000), and printed by Schmitz Press in Sparks, Maryland. The book’s large format provides ample space to appreciate distinctive imagery from nearly two centuries of Baltimore’s and MICA’s interwoven history.
Further information about the book, including a link to the MICA Store where the book is available for purchase, is at the following link:
http://www.mica.edu/About_MICA/Facts_and_History/MICA_History_Book.html

About the Award:
The Arline Custer Memorial Award recognizes the best books and articles written or compiled by individuals and institutions in the MARAC region – the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.

Works under consideration include, but are not limited to, monographs, popular narratives, reference works and exhibition catalogs using archival sources.

Works must be relevant to the general public as well as the archival community. They also should be original and well-researched using available sources. In addition, they should be clearly presented, well-written and organized. Visual materials, if used, should be appropriate to the text.

————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Kathy also asked that I post the following sad news for those who may not have seen the recent posting on ARLIS-L:

It is with great sadness we share with you that our dear friend and colleague Florence Thorp died early on October 3^rd at her parent’s home in Vernon Center, NY.  Florence joined MICA in July, 2001 as Director of the Media Resources Collection. She was promoted in June, 2009 to Director of the Decker Library when the Library and Media Resources were merged into a single department. Florence had previously worked in visual resources at her alma mater, Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY.

Florence courageously battled pancreatic cancer over the past year. She was one of the best of us, a consummate professional, always with a smile and a wonderfully mischievous sense of humor. She will be tremendously missed by all who had the pleasure of knowing her.

A memorial gathering was held at MICA’s Decker Library on Thursday, October 6. Services for Florence were in Vernon Center, NY, also on October 6. A full obituary with details about the services can be found at the following link to the Utica Observer-Dispatch:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/uticaod/obituary.aspx?n=florence-jill-thorp&pid=153963121

They include:

March 24:

Workshop–”Postcards From the Edge IV: Fashion and Textiles”

Lisa Schattman, Design Institute of San Diego, co-organizer; Robin Dodge, Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, presenter.

March 25:

Session–Case Studies I

Anne Hepburn, Pacific Northwest College of Art, speaker

“Inside Out: Examining Studio Artists’ Perceptions, Representations and Actual Use of the Fine Arts Library”

Gabrielle Reed, Massachusetts College of Art,  moderator

March 26:

Session–”Engaging New Technologies”

Sarah Carter, Ringling College of Art and Design, speaker

Heather Cleary, Otis College of Art and Design, speaker

Session–”How Do We Shelve it? The Place for Vendor Provided Electronic Titles in Art and Architecture Collections”

Sarah Falls, New York School of Interior Design, speaker

March 27:

Poster sessions:

“Surviving Research Anywhere”–Heather Koopmans, Savannah College of Art and Design

“Building Bridges to Serve your Community”–Kari Horowicz, Rochester Institute of Technology

Minneapolis, MN

Hello all,

On behalf of myself and Elinor Nacheman I would like to welcome you all to join us for the next Art & Design school libraries division meeting. This meeting will be held Sunday, March 27th at 11:15.  The venue is Marquette II. We will be posting the agenda soon on the Sched site. We will also be posting a plea for topics concerning our art and design library community on the ARLIS list-serve. Please take the time to e-mail us back so we can begin brainstorming.

Best,

Co-Chairs

Elinor Nachemen, RISD Fleet Library

&

Gabrielle Reed, MassART Morton R. Godine Library

For our 2009 open house, we designed and assembled the following button booklets for students that included a mix of fun facts, library services, and operations information.  The text was laid out in Adobe Illustrator by a work-study student.  Our student worker also helped to print multiples on 11″ x 17″ pages, slice, fold, hole-punch and attach the buttons.  Click here to see the text inside the booklets.

Finally, we got even more mileage out of our button maker by handing out buttons at our recent Accepted Students Day.  People are always interested to hear that the images on these buttons directly represent the materials we have in our library.  They were just as big a hit with parents as they were with students!

Welcome
Introduction of Current Officers (Ellen Petraits and Moira Steven)
Meeting Recorder: Lisa Schattman
Announcement of next year’s moderators (Elinor Nacheman and Gabrielle Reed)
Volunteers for Incoming vice-moderators
Passing of Division attendence sheet

Open Forum Topics

• status of the ADSL blog – 13 posts over the past 3 years(including this one)
  New ways to use the blog? Switch to another platform? Interest in continuing the blog?
• Managing in these economic times – strategies to stretch the dollar
• The fate of the reference collection in A&D libraries
• The library as exhibition space
• Developing library instruction content specifically for upper-level undergraduates
• how other schools provide access to their back-issues of Vogue
• discuss studio artists using library websites as an access tool and if through assessment are we designing our websites for actual usability

New furniture has been ordered and will be installed in mid-August along with a laptop “bar”. If you are interested in seeing what we are doing, there are some photos in our blog which can be accessed from the news section of our home page at http://library.uarts.edu/.

Each year that I attend the ARLIS conference I meet and connect with more people. I learn who shares my interests, who would be a reliable partner for session moderation or panel session, who knows what ropes and who needs me to show them my ropes. It’s a great source of juice to power me through the year, but I find that I often need a bump here and there to keep me motivated until I see these colleagues again the next conference. Staying connected to colleagues and sharing and brainstorming ideas with them I think is so vital to my success as a librarian. During our ADSL Division discussion this year we also discussed ways to stay connected. This blog was one way we thought would help keep us juiced during the year. Outside of the ARLIS community, I also read the ACRLog and belong to the ili-l@ala.org listserv. What are some of the ways you all stay juiced during the year?