ARLIS/NA 45th Annual Conference

Every year at the ARLIS/NA conference, those of us who work at small museum libraries with one or two staff members are inspired by the large scale projects of our big sisters. How can we translate this inspiration to action with small means and little staff? Over the past year the Menil Collection has embarked on small scale digitization and access projects that are budget neutral, but provide access to information and resources generated by our museum that were previously only found in our archives. Through repackaging born digital gallery guides and ephemera to capturing and cataloguing finding aids and foundation documents we are beginning to make our entire exhibition history available globally for the first time. Using our own library catalogue and shared resources such as OCLC Discovery and the Getty Research Portal, digital surrogates of our important ephemeral publications are now part of the scholarly record. We have developed workflows that integrate this work into our schedule seamlessly. This has not only made valuable information more accessible, but also helped raise the library’s profile within the broader digital initiatives of our museum. It is our hope that our work will be helpful not only to scholars and researchers who will now have access to our content, but also as a model for our colleagues in smaller institutions who wish to make their own museum’s ephemera more widely available and help them overcome the intimidation that sometime accompanies such endeavors when we do not have large staffs and deep pockets.uilt Environment Resource Directory of the Washington, DC Metro Area (BERD) is an innovative “open” reference publication that embodies best practices of open scholarship. This new electronic monographic edition is current and efficient in design and content retrieval, has enhanced interactivity, and is universally available. It is geared to architects, historians, librarians, preservationists, planners and real estate developers. Discovery can be made inside the directory itself, but also through search engines. The directory is accessed not only via a web-browser but also via a mobile website. A further enhancement is the use of a mapping plug-in to provide geographic visualization and orientation. By design, this research project utilized principles of the "open research cycle." This paper will articulate what the open research cycle is and how BERD meets open scholarship criteria as defined by the Association of Research Libraries. It will demonstrate how the many opportunities for editorial and project management decisions in producing a publication like BERD can be focused on reaching the goal of a sustainable open resource. We will cover the following topics: data management plans for preservation and sharing data, public domain content, metadata (Dublin Core, VRA Core), name authorities (LC, Getty Thesaurus of Artists Name), open source platforms and plug-ins that create open functionalities, open access, Creative Commons Licensing, crowdsourcing for peer review and discovery enhancement, self-archiving in institutional repositories, and google analytics.