Alumna Ann C. Shincovich wins the ARLIS/NA Gerd Muehsam Award

Alumna Ann C. Shincovich has won the 2003 Art Libraries Society of North America’s (ARLIS/NA) Gerd Muehsam Award. This award is given each year to the best student paper submitted on a topic relating to art librarianship or visual resources curatorship. As an MLIS student in the spring and summer of 2003, Shincovich wrote her paper, “An Examination of Copyright issues related to the creation of a Digital Resource for the Artists’ Books Collection at the Frick Fine Arts Library, University of Pittsburgh.” The paper describes the production of a web resource and describes the fair use and copyright issues that were faced and overcome.

In this project, Shincovich enjoyed the guidance of her faculty advisors Drs. Edie Rasmussen and David Robins. Robins remarked, “Ann did a great job on this project—it was refreshing to work with such a committed student. Not only did she write the paper that won the award, but she photographed the entire Frick Fine Arts Library collection of artist book, digitized the photographs, and created a web site through which they can be accessed (should the copyright issues be resolved). Ann’s dedication to learning and to the profession should serve as a model.”

Paula Gabbard, from the Columbia University Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library and an ARLIS/NA Gerd Muehsam Award committee member, called the paper praiseworthy, writing, “The committee evaluating her paper gave it uniformly the highest scores over all the other ten submissions.”

Shincovich was thrilled to learn that her paper had merited ARLIS/NA recognition, “I am happy about the award because I am very proud of the artists’ books website project. There were many people who helped me produce the website and are still involved with it today.” She concluded, “I hope that other students, librarians, and visual resource professionals view the paper as one example of how these issues can be handled and why clearer legal guidelines need to be established.”