Megan Battey, Visual Resources Curator, will demonstrate the Visual Resources Collection’s wonderful new digital assets management system, Shared Shelf. Shared Shelf is an on-line, cloud-based image management system for cataloguing, accessing and using our local image collection seamlessly through the ARTstor interface. This offers many advantages – user-friendly cataloguing tools, one-stop-shopping for our image users and reduced need for local infrastructure as our collection is now securely housed in “the cloud.”

This represents the culmination of two years of work collaborating closely with ARTstor, LIS and eight other institutional partners (Colby, Cornell, Harvard, NYU, Society of Architectural Historians, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami and Yale University).

Middlebury faculty and students are already enthusiastically using the system. Middlebury’s was one of the first collections to go live in Shared Shelf which will be released worldwide in July 2011.

More information about Shared Shelf: Overview.

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“Liaison Discussion Section” is a revival of librarians’ “Reference Training and Review” sessions. “Liaison Discussion Section” meetings address topics of interest to liaisons: research and/or technology. They can be conversations, or presentations, or both. They take place most often on the 3rd week of the month, but in order to allow people who work different hours to attend, they’ll occasionally be scheduled for different days/times.

Middlebury’s is one of the first collections to go live in Shared Shelf, which will be released worldwide in July 2011. There are currently 3,143 images in the Middlebury collection, and the collection is growing as we continually add images to support the curriculum.

For more information about Shared Shelf, go to: http://www.artstor.org/shared-shelf/s-html/shared-shelf-home.shtml. To access our collection:

• Go to http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml
• Click “Go”
• Click on “Middlebury Visual Resources” at the bottom.  It is not necessary to log in.

Users can search all ARTstor collections together, or just our local collection. Faculty and students are already enthusiastically using the system and Megan looks forward to demonstrating Shared Shelf’s features at upcoming LIS meetings.