EDUCAUSE

Jeremy and I are presenting at EDUCAUSE tomorrow at 8:10 am. Here is our presentation as it stands:

Twitter: good for lots of news

Since our redesign, coming up on a year ago, the news portion of our home page has been this blog. And while we've had some wonderful things to report, we haven't exactly had a great number of things to say. This was especially true over the past summer. We reported the NEA grant award on April 30th, and then nothing else until the word of Margo's retirement in late September. Because of our blog drought, one might think that not much has happened with accessCeramics over the summer. Of course, that's not entirely accurate: our collection grew by about 33%, or nearly 600 images.

Whenever an artist contributes images to accessCeramics, it's news-worthy. But perhaps based upon our limited time and resources, it wasn't necessarily blog-worthy. But thanks to Twitter and its API, that has changed. Now when Miranda accepts submitted images into the collection, a Twitter post is generated for each contributing artist to our Twitter feed via a PHP script and the Twitter API, and is logged in our MySQL database. And now that our home page news is based upon our Twitter feed instead of this blog, we can effectively promote new images on accessCeramics without any additional work.

We'll still maintain this blog for announcements that extend beyond Twitter's 140 character limit, and will reference any relevant blog posts on our Twitter feed. But with this new model of news, we can hopefully do a better job at promoting the artists and their new works on accessCeramics without extending our already limited resources.

And in case anyone wants to follow our Twitter feed directly, it's http://twitter.com/accessceramics

accessCeramics co-founder Margo Ballantyne retiring

Margo Ballantyne, one of the original founders of accessCeramics, will retire next week from her position as Visual Resources Curator at Lewis & Clark College. Margo has been at Lewis & Clark for 19 years, and has admirably brought the College's visual collections into the digital age. She has been an active leader in the VRA community at a local and national level.
Margo has contributed a great deal of enthusiasm, energy, and fun to the accessCeramics project. While she still may be involved at some level, her influence, great humor, and ability to keep some of our crazy ideas in check will be greatly missed.
Stephanie Beene, a recent graduate of the University ot Texas-Austin's School of Information, will take Margo's place as the Visual Resources Curator at Lewis & Clark. She will also serve on the accessCeramics curatorial board, and will almost certainly bring fresh ideas to the project.

accessCeramics receives NEA grant

We're pleased to announce that accessCeramics has been awarded a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts - Access to Artistic Excellence grant in the Visual Arts category. The $10,000 award will support the continued expansion of accessCeramics as well as the introduction of master artists' works into the collection over the 2009/10 academic year.

According to the Arts Endowment website, the Access to Artistic Excellence grant program "encourages and supports artistic creativity, preserves our diverse cultural heritage, and makes the arts more widely available in communities throughout the country." In other words, a great fit for accessCeramics and specifically our goal to make images of high quality contemporary ceramic art widely available to the arts education community.

Thanks to the Arts Endowment and a hearty kudos to the accessCeramics team!

accessCeramics at the Northwest History and Heritage Extravaganza 2009

On April 18th, the accessCeramics project was introduced to community leaders, staff and volunteers from historical societies, museums, schools, historic preservation commissions, humanities groups, professional historians, and archaeologists, who attended the NW History and Heritage Extravaganza conference in Portland, Oregon. Margo Ballantyne, a member of the accessCeramics team, participated on a panel about providing access to digital images that are housed in visual resource collections, libraries, and archives, or other venues that make use of modern electronic tools and practices.

Session Title:
DAM if you do. DAM if you don’t: Digital Asset Management &
Delivering Access to Image Collections

Session Chair: Tiah Edmunson-Morton, Oregon State University.
Margo Ballantyne, Lewis & Clark College
Julia Simic, University of Oregon
Karin Whalen, Reed College

accessCeramics at NCECA

Look for accessCeramics at the upcoming NCECA 2009 Conference "Ceramic Interface: From Dawn to Digital" April 8-11, 2009 in Phoenix, AZ.

We'll have a table at Booth T35 with a representative who can answer your questions about using the collection. We'd also love to work with artists interested in submitting to the collection.

For more information contact: Miranda Costa (missmcosta@gmail.com).

accessCeramics in Toronto!

Margo Ballantyne presented on the accessCeramics project at the Visual Resources Association annual conference in Toronto today. The presentation was part of a panel entitled "Outside the Canon" about "recent and ongoing projects that often push the boundaries of traditional content areas in visual resources."

Outside the Canon

Co-moderators:

• Laurel Bliss, San Diego State University
• Melissa Lamont, San Diego State University

Speakers:

• Rodney G. Obien, Worcester Polytechnic Institute - George C. Gordon Library
• Bill Kirby, Director, Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art
• Birgit Plietzsch, University of St Andrews
• Margo Ballantyne, Lewis & Clark College