Personal Archiving Mini-Workshops in the Visual Resources Library

The Visual Resources Library of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will be conducting a series of short Personal Archiving workshops on focused topics for the Fall 2022 semester. If you are a member of the UNC community who is an artist, art historian, archivist, librarian, or just art-interested, these one-and-a-half-hour sessions will introduce you to concepts and tools for managing the many materials, records, documents, images, and files–physical and digital–that you acquire and keep as part of working with art or making art. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by large quantities of “stuff,” you can begin to use these materials as resources for your professional advancement: for artists, you can increase your productivity, make your work more accessible to others, retain your rights to your work and its reproductions, and increase your visibility in your community of practice; for archivists and scholars, you can research, write, and publish more efficiently, increase critical access to these materials that support and inspire new work, and create sustainable relationships with the makers in your community. Each mini-workshop is intended to model a practice of establishing ongoing goals for managing your archives that are SMART: Specific, Manageable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based.

PLEASE NOTE: Because of space restrictions, each workshop can have a maximum of 20 participants. Below each workshop listing is a registration form to sign up for a spot. We will keep a waitlist and there is an option to sign on to the waitlist for a given workshop at the bottom of the page. Similar workshops on new topics will be offered in the Spring 2022 semester.

Register at Artist Studio Archives Personal Archiving Mini-Workshops.

All workshops will be held on a Thursday from 3:30-5:00 pm in the Visual Resources Library, Hanes Art Center, Room 214, UNC-Chapel Hill, 115 South Columbia Street, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599. Light refreshments will be served at each workshop.

Workshop I September 15, 2022
Documenting Artworks: Keeping track photographically or digitally (scanning) of every idea, sketch, mock-up, model, prototype, edition, version, installation, or finished work. The workshop will cover basic strategies for photographing artworks, in your studio, in storage, in a gallery or museum, or outdoors; scanning flat originals, photographs, slides, film, postcards, prints, and published images; and a few photoshop steps for squaring up, cropping, and cleaning up your photographs and scans.

Registration for this workshop will open on August 15 at 8:00 am and will close when filled or on September 14 at 5:00 pm.

Workshop II October 13, 2022
Organizing Your Files: Making order from your digital files by using consistent file formats, naming conventions, file sizes, folder structures, and keeping multiple backups in secure locations. It is recommended that you bring your own laptop for this workshop to start setting up these conventions where you will be using them.

Registration for this workshop will open on August 15 at 8:00 am and will close when filled or on October 12 at 5:00 pm.

Workshop III November 10, 2022
Managing Your Personal Image Archive with Tropy: Now that it is all organized, how do you find it again? How do you keep track of where the image or artwork is, was, or will be? Where has it been published and who has the rights to the image? The workshop will focus on using Tropy, a free platform for managing image files, to catalog images using metadata, add transcriptions of text on images, tag images or parts of images, and add extensive notes to images.

Registration for this workshop will open on August 15 at 8:00 am and will close when filled or on November 9 at 5:00 pm.