Descriptive Notes is soliciting posts for an upcoming series on the Description of Visual Materials.
Does your institution collect visual materials? What descriptive tools, standards, and/or processes do you use to describe these materials for researcher access or collections management? What particular challenges do visual materials pose for archival description? Descriptive Notes is looking for articles, announcements, case studies, and other posts related to the how, what, and why of visual materials description at your institution to share with our readership.
This series will build out of two collaborative sessions with the Visual Materials Section over the last year, the first in-person at the 2024 SAA Annual Meeting and the second virtually in early February 2025. Visual materials - from photographs to artwork to maps to architectural plans - present a variety of descriptive challenges, and we’d like to take the conversations we began together to Descriptive Notes.
Posts may consider themes such as: the differences between (and similarities of) describing papers materials and visual materials, including identification; implementing processing workflows with DACS and/or visual materials-specific standards; the unique challenges of reparative description of visual materials; the differences in describing published and unpublished visual materials in catalogs and finding aids… and more!
Submit your pitches to saadescription@gmail.com. You can read more on our submission guidelines here: https://saadescription.wordpress.com/guidelines/
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Betts Coup
Head of Archival Operations
Technical Services for Archives & Special Collections
Archives, Arts, & Special Collections
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
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