Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Connecting to Collections Forum: Day 1


Today’s sessions at the Connecting to Collections Forum in Buffalo, NY were completely varied but consistently engaging, covering everything from “going green” to volunteerism. Much of it was “nuts and bolts,” so I won’t recount it all here, but if you’re interested, the talks will be available online at the IMLS website, as are previous forum sessions. There is also a great video making the case for the preservation and conservation of our cultural heritage that you can watch here.

As one of today’s speakers put it, “we understand the world through our images…and together we must preserve these extraordinary resources for future generations.” In their wisdom, the organizers of the forum made the best case for our cause--for me, anyway--by starting the day with docent-led tours of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, one of the nation’s great collections of modern and contemporary art. Seeing some modern art history college textbooks in the gift shop, I half-jokingly asked if they used them in lieu of a collections catalogue. They do not, but appreciated the joke anyway.

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