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E books- Thoughts and Trends

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Barbara Opar, column editor

Will the e-book soon replace the print book in the arts? It is safe to say that more such content is becoming available every day and that many people often choose the Kindle or iPad over print for reading novels on their daily commute. New interfaces allow for seamless searching, zooming and even multimedia features. But while the trend toward e-content continues, publishing in the arts remains somewhat different.  Incompatible formats are one factor. Large- format, heavily illustrated books do not easily lend themselves to electronic devices. It takes longer to read text on a screen than on a page and there is a fatigue factor. The market, too, is different. Museum bookstores serve as opportunities for art lovers to find current and past exhibition catalogs or locate unusual items. The art book is often an artifact, given as a gift. Editions can be limited and include special content. The publisher Phaidon has gone so far as to commission limited edition vases to be sold along with a book about the work of the product designer, Hella Jongeius.

So when is the e-book going to take off in the arts?  Factors include the focus of large scale digitization projects like Google Books and the Digital Public Library of America. Self-publication could also increase. But e-textbooks are a likely future market.  Barnes and Noble is one of a number of distributors looking to increase business in this area through partnerships.

There is no question about how the e-book can help developing nations to expand access to information.  Yet, not every country has embraced the e-book. While e-books account for about twenty percent of the current U.S. publishing market, in Germany that figure is surprisingly but one percent. The physical book is near and dear to the lives of Germans and they take pride in producing quality work.  As such, publishers, who in that country, set market price still favor the printed book. Even the German tax system plays a factor. Printed books are currently exempt from Germany’s nineteen percent value added tax.

Time will tell if e-book growth in the arts takes off suddenly or if visual materials lack behind what is otherwise a growing trend- in the U.S. anyway.

Architecture in the Mediated Environment of Contemporary Culture; A New Forum for Research and Communication

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Graham James with Rachel Isaac-Menard (about AMPS – Ravensbourne University College; Florida State University)

ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is a new online forum and academic resource repository and fully peer-reviewed, open access academic journal.  ISSN 2050-9006

It is a forum for the analysis of architecture in the mediated environment of contemporary culture. It seeks to expand an understanding of architecture and its relationship with media, politics and society in its broadest sense. It is a unique project that combines the work of information specialists and academics.

The origins of the journal were in a collaboration between the two current editors on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding bid. Although that particular bid was not successful, they developed the project further and it is now hosted on the web site. It is called Architecture as Political Image and investigates the use of architecture in political campaign imagery in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Identifying not only a lack of material on this particular subject research area, but on the sometimes direct relationships between politics and architecture in general, Dr Graham Cairns and Rachel Isaac Menard developed the project into the forum / journal ARCHITECTURE MEDIA POLITICS SOCIETY. The journal has now been running since September 2012 and intends to fill a subject void in current academic publishing.

Beyond this however, the project attempts to develop a closer and more dynamic relationship between academics, researchers and information specialists in a number of ways. The intention is to run a resource repository that has five specific functions.

The first of these functions is to offer a discussion forum and networking venue for information specialists in the areas of interest for the journal. A double blind peer reviewed paper, written by a librarian, will be published every two months. It will set the theme of a discussion forum between members of the Information Services Committee and external participants. Dedicated exclusively to librarians, it is hoped that informative discussions can take place and that networking can be instigated between users of the site.

The second and third functions of the repository are related to the journal’s overall themes. They are the AMPS Critical Review section which will be updated monthly and a Current Events section to be updated on a rolling basis. The critical reviews will be double blind peer reviewed and can be written by any contributor to AMPS. It is expected that the reviews will be primarily of books but can also include films, documentaries or any other relevant events or publications. The aim of the Current Events section is to offer a wider range of shorter reviews, conference postings and calls for papers etc. This listing will include publically available brief descriptions.

The fourth and fifth functions of the repository are more specifically related to the hosted project. They are a Websites Index – Archive and a Research Guide. The Websites Index lists sites currently active and dealing with political communication and / or the relationship between architecture and politics in terms of direct policy or image. The Research Guide lists printed and audio-visual materials on the same themes.  The intention is to make the Websites Index an internationally accessible research source and eventually create an archive that will be presented for collection to a relevant institution such as the Library of Congress, the British Library and / or the Canadian Centre for Architecture.  The Research Guide will be an extensive and specialised bibliography categorised into materials relevant to political communication, architecture as contemporary symbolism and media studies.  At the end of the “Architecture as Political Image” project, both a website index and bibliography will be set up based on the next hosted project.

The editors are also seeking to combine the skills and knowledge of researchers and information specialists through the medium of academic conferences. They are currently engaged in conversations with a number of international institutions about hosting a conference on the journal’s themes which will produce photographic and written materials for eventual archiving. This would include papers but also extended bibliographic lists and source indexes.

These innovative features are embedded in the standard structure of an academic journal. Here too however, a number of particular characteristics distinguish the project. Its theme is more explicit in its political slant than is normal and, in addition, it is explicit about its treatment of architecture a cultural phenomenon that cannot be divorced from other disciplines.

It publishes one article online each month and has the intention of publishing a printed book every two years. This book will contain more developed selected texts, and thus uses the electronic print option as a basis for more substantial printed publications. The electronic format also allows for reader and peer feedback and it is hoped that this can help authors develop their work and possibly function as a point of reference in itself.

The journal thus aims to move the academic printing and publication model in slightly new ways and, importantly, set up a more established and detailed collaboration between research and information than currently exists in academia or academic publishing generally.

www.architecturemps.com

Currently, Dr Graham Cairns is a Visiting Professor at Ravensbourne (University College), London, UK and Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, US. He will also be taking up a fellowship at California Institute of the Arts. gc@architecturemps.com Rachel Isaac-Menard teaches information literacy at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. ris@architecturemps.com

They run ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY as an independent project that is not exclusively associated with any single University. Rather, it is run in affiliation with a variety of international institutions. This too is an unusual, although not unique, characteristic of the journal that tries to ensure a wide range of participants and allow the project and journal to respond to different interests and factors that cross geographical and specific institutional concerns.

In all of these ways, the journal is seeking to tread new ground while aligning itself with some established practices and models. Thus far, its multi institutional basis has led to the publication of papers written in the US, the UK and Mexico. It is seeking to develop conferences in Canada and in Europe and, crucially, it brings together aspects of the typical institutional set up that remain too divorced; academia, research and information studies. It is hoped that this combination of academics and information services specialists will lead to both an interesting journal and a highly useful data resource.

 

Association of Architecture School Librarians

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Kevin McMahon, Library Manager, Sci-Arc
Barbara Opar, Column editor

AASL is pleased to share with you this listing of architecture lectures which are freely available online. The list was compiled by Kevin McMahon, Library Manager at Sci-Arc. AASL welcomes additions to the list. You may post material under the comments section at the end of the AASL column.

Architecture lecture archives available online

11h45 Montre l’architecture, Video. Also at Vimeo, and DailyMotion.

Architectural Association, Video Archive.

The Architectural League of New York, Podcasts.

Architectural Record, Record Video.

ArchitectureLab, Videos & Interviews.

Architekturclips (by Urbanfilmlab.e.V.)

Architekturvideo (by Eric Strum)

Architettura.tv (by Synch)

Bartlett School of Architecture on Vimeo

Copyright. Copyright! Copyright!!

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Association of Architecture School Librarians
by Barbara Opar, column editor

All we ever seem to hear about in the academic press is copyright and the intellectual property issues being raised about compliance. But, now a number of academic libraries – Cornell, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, the University of California, the University of Florida, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin are joining together to address “orphan works” in their collections and to work to make them accessible within their own institutions.

“Orphan works” are out-of-print materials, mostly books, that are still subject to copyright, but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or located despite concentrated efforts to do so.

The libraries noted above are identifying works being previously scanned and archived in the  HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust is a partnership of more than fifty major research institutions (and growing) working to share, archive and preserve their combined collections of digitized books and journals. The HathiTrust has collected and organized over nine million volumes, a high percentage of which fall into the category of “orphan works”.

The institutional members are committed to a careful review of copyright for any titles before making them available digitally. Members must also own print copies of the titles and restrict access to members of their respective communities. Online access is authenticated by the user with their university ID and  password .

The Orphan Works Project should improve access to a large amount of scholarly material that has been digitally unavailable due to copyright concerns. Because the Orphan Works Project limits access to members of individual institutions, it adheres to the Copyright Act’s “fair use” provision, which allows limited reproduction of works for scholarly purposes. This differs from the Google Books project which wanted to make such works accessible online without permission from copyright owners. Hence that resulting  lawsuit and subsequent issues.  This new project should be a win-win for both sides of the copyright debate.

 

SCI-Arc Media Archive

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Column by Kevin McMahon, Library Manager, Sci-Arc

Barbara Opar, AASL column editor

WHAT IS IT? An online showcase of videos of public events held at SCI-Arc from 1972 to the present. The SMA is designed to be useful for students and scholars, but also to be easy to use and fun for anybody with an interest in architecture, Los Angeles and experimental design.

LOCATION: http://sma.sciarc.edu

LAUNCHED: September 28, 2012

AVERAGE VISITS PER MONTH: 8300

THE MATERIAL: In 1973 Ray Kappe invited Los Angeles Public Access Project, providers of community-produced public access programing for Theta Cable, to set up shop on the second floor of SCI-Arc’s facility at 1800 Berkeley Street. Within a year, SCI-Arc purchased their own equipment and began documenting Wednesday night lectures and other school events.

THE SITE: Planning began in earnest Fall 2009. Support from the Getty Foundation, the NEA, and a partnership with the MAK materialized Spring 2011. The digitization and video review process extended from Summer 2011 through February 2012, employing an extensive temporary staff who reviewed, described and subclipped all the videos.

SITE DESIGN: The interface was designed to focus attention on the videos. If the Explore page is not as elaborate as an academic library catalog, it’s because this site is both a catalog and a viewer.

VIDEOS AVAILABLE: 696, adding new & old material every week.

DATES COVERED: 1972 to now.

FEATURED SPEAKERS: 691, plus 121 introducers. 36 of the people mentioned in 2013 Pacific Standard Time events are represented in at least one video in SMA.

DESCRIPTIVE TEXTS: Searching the videos is facilitated by summaries ranging from 10 to 95 words each. The site contains over 200,000 words of text.

SUBJECT THEMES: 3133. The themes employ a controlled vocabulary, complimenting the natural language narrative video descriptions (see the selection on the back of this page).

EXHIBITS: Only 5, so far. Later this Spring the site will begin regularly adding provocative selections from the archive selected by guest curators.

POSTERS: 105, and counting. It’s hoped that alumni and faculty will be able to fill in the chronological gaps.

EDITING? The videos are presented as found: none have been edited or technically sweetened.

COMPLETENESS? The Archive will never be done. New material is added every week, and previously unknown old material is discovered regularly.

OUTSIDE USE? SMA’s policy is that the videos now exist exclusively online, within the context of the Media Archive site. Anyone working on a presentation, media project or exhibit should explore ways of linking to the videos as they appear in the site. Bibliographic citations are available for all videos and posters.

FOR MORE INFO: See the ABOUT pages for more about the videos and the site.

CONTACT: archive@sciarc.edu

Digital Archives- the beginnings of a list

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Barbara Opar, column editor

Looking for images of regional architecture…or archives…online? This topic came up in several discussions at our recent Association of Architectural Librarians conferences and we would like to compile a list of digital archives. The beginning of such a list appears below, but this is, by no means, complete. We know that many regional repositories are not easy to find. AASL plans to gather this information and post it on our website: http://www.architecturelibrarians.org/. But we need your help. If you are aware of an architectural repository, especially one which includes image files, please contact us. You may email Barbara Opar (baopar@syr.edu) with the name and address of the collection. Your help is very much appreciated. Meanwhile, take a look at the list below.

National

American Memory (U.S.)

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Built in America (U.S)

http://frontiers.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/

Making of America (U.S.)

http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/

Regional image collections

http://oedb.org/library/features/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives#multi

Las Vegas Architecture and Buildings

http://library.nevada.edu/arch/lasvegas/index.html

Digital Archive of Newark Architecture

http://archlib.njit.edu/collections/dana/index.php

NYPL Digital Gallery (New York City and other)

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm

 

Northwest Digital Archive

http://nwda.orbiscascade.org/index.shtml

Philadelphia Architects and Buildings

http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/

Canadian Architectural Archives

http://caa.ucalgary.ca/viewsof20thcentury/imagebank

Other:

City and Buildings Database (worldwide)

http://content.lib.washington.edu/buildingsweb/index.html

Great Buildings (worldwide)

http://www.greatbuildings.com/search.html

E-publishing the Easy Way - interested in starting an ejournal?

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Cathy Carpenter, Head of the Georgia Tech Architecture Library

In 2008, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library collaborated with Kathy Roper, Associate Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Building Construction to create the International Journal of Facility Management.  The library hosts the journal and college faculty serve as editors and managers of the journal.  The library journal hosting service is part of the Library’s larger initiative to help advance new forms of scholarly publishing. The journal is published quarterly and devoted to the science, technology and practice of facility management. The audience consists of faculty, researchers, practioners and allied professional organizations. Each volume contains academic papers as well as a case study from a practioner. The most recent volume included three academic papers: Comparison of Thirty Green Building Projects across the US: Common Elements; The Strategic Facilities Management Organization in Housing: Implications for Sustainable Facilities Management; Classification and Climate Zone Greenhouse Gas Inventory Benchmarking in Higher Education and a professional practice paper on Atlanta Botanical Gardens Sustainability Case Study.

The International Journal of Facility Management is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. Articles published in open-access journals provide greater visibility and are cited more often than articles published in for-profit journals.  Researchers can more easily find information and then build upon what has been done, thus enhancing scholarship.  Plus, practioners in the field have access to published university research, which is not the case with subscription based journals. The journal is published using the Open Journals System software for management and publishing support.

More than 14,000 journals are being published worldwide using the Open Journals System.  OJS can be downloaded for free and installed on a local Web server. OJS is a multilingual system, allowing a journal to be published in two or three languages. It covers all aspects of online publishing, from establishing a journal website to operational tasks such as the author’s submission process, peer review, editing, publication, archiving and indexing of the journal. Content is available in PDF or HTML versions and can contain images or audio and video content.  OJC is scalable and can enable a single editor to manage all aspects of a journal or it can support an international team. The software can be used either to transition an existing paper-based or email attachment journal workflow into one that exists solely online or to create a brand new open access journal. For more information:

International Journal of Facility Management:     http://www.ijfm.net/index.php/ijfm
Open Journal System website:    http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
List of journals using OJS:   http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals

Unpacking My Library

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Association of Architecture School Librarians
by Barbara Opar, column editor

We all know how much value architects place on the tactile and physical objects. We also know why they still like the printed book. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the 2009 book and exhibition entitled: Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books. In addition to showing the variety of reading matter leading architects and educators have collected, this title gave us insight into their minds and development. Steven Holl, for instance, states (p.97) “I’ve felt that a book is like a building, and a building is like a book.”

Following in this same vein is a web site entitled Designers & Books which I suggest you explore. 56 designers from Emilio Ambasz to Eva Zeisel  share their reading lists. The site states that it is devoted to making known those books that the participants have identified as meaningful and formative, which have shaped both their world views as well as their personal ideas about design.

Some of the architects included on the site were part of Unpacking My Library.   But you will see new names as well, including Andres Duany, who not surprisingly lists twelve books dealing with cities and urban design. Denise Scott Brown’s choices include T.S. Eliot and Tom Wolfe as well as writings by John Brinckerhoff Jackson on landscape. Daniel Libeskind does not include any architecture titles among his 9 item list.

To read more, go to: www.designersandbooks.com

Using Tablets in Architecture Education

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by Cathryn Ziefle Woodbury University, School of Architecture, San Diego

Barbara Opar, column editor

“Isn’t there an app for that?” is a reasonable question these days and often the answer is, yes. So, when it comes to architecture instruction one should ask, “Isn’t there an app for that?”

Currently, e-books for art and architecture are not plentiful or advanced enough. Nevertheless, most universities do subscribe to e-books.  Most will require the Bluefire Reader app to access them; and all Amazon e-books can be read via the Kindle app.

Ask your librarian what architecture periodicals come with a free digital edition. Otherwise, many architecture periodicals can be purchased through the Zinio app. If you are interested in reading PDFs the GoodReader app allows you to read PDF (and TXT) files of 100MB or more. In addition, you can mark-up the document with text boxes, sticky notes, and free hand drawings. It costs $4.99 but there are free knock-off apps available. Almost all of these apps sync with Dropbox that allows you to access any file that is in your Dropbox from any computer, tablet, or smart phone.

Two of the best apps for reference are Pocket Architect and Buildings. Pocket Architect highlights architectural elements and techniques with pictures, descriptions, and links to more information on the web. Buildings uses GPS-technology to provide information on historic, contemporary, and conceptual buildings around you.

There are a number of apps for sketching and drawing. Depending on what you want to do Penultimate and Sketchbook top the list. Penultimate is the best-selling app for taking notes and sketching. Sketchbook, on the other hand, boasts a complete set of sketching and painting tools for digital art. If it is architectural drawing you want to do, try out the AutoCAD WS or iCad app.

There are quite a few news apps, but Architizer and Design Observer rank among the top. The Architect News app from the website of Architect magazine is also noteworthy.

Perhaps the most innovative apps fall under the “urban studies” category. The ArcGIS app explores the newest ways of using maps. The Business Analyst Online (BAO) app gives demographic and market facts about the U.S. Lastly, although almost everyone is familiar with Google Earth, the app takes it to a new level with access to data like real-time earthquakes, planes in flight, and city tours.

Finally, two apps that are far superior are Urban Augmented Reality (UAR) and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA). UAR lets you look at buildings past, present, and future in any location (limited to the Netherlands, for now). Moreover, it shares plans, historic photos, biographies, and walking routes. The ZHA app allows you to search the practice’s current portfolio, but more importantly, features augmented reality tours when you visit the buildings.

For a more extensive list of apps and slide show of this article scan the QR code on this page.

A UCLA-SAHARA Architectural Image Collaboration

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Janine Henri and Alivia Zappas
University of California, Los Angeles Arts Library    

Like many faculty who have been teaching with images for several decades, UCLA Art History Professor Dell Upton’s office is filled with slides. There are drawers upon drawers of images of Quaker meeting halls, Machu Picchu’s ruins, and Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe. In spring 2011, UCLA Architecture, Design, and Digital Services librarian Janine Henri supervised library science graduate student Alivia Zappas, and collaborated with Professor Upton to upload and create records in SAHARA for over 400 of these images, digitized from slides.

The collaborative nature of this project was very much in line with the principles upon which SAHARA was built. SAHARA, the Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive was conceived to

“…provide an opportunity for the leaders of SAH, architectural historians, librarians, publishers, technologists, and higher education administrators to study, develop, and implement educational and discipline-based strategies to advance scholarly communication in the context of the ongoing digital revolution in the field of architectural history.”[i]

The collaboration between a professor, a librarian, and a graduate student, enriched the experience and enhanced the image records. The creation of an image’s descriptive record often necessitates research. For images of well-known buildings or sites, minimal research needs to be done: the needed information can be gleaned from consulting a book or authoritative source.  Other less known buildings require a great deal more research.

Professor Upton’s records provided building name and location information only. Janine Henri and Alivia Zappas resorted to creative and rigorous reference work to track down appropriate additional information such as dates, materials, and structural elements.  Zappas was then able to build up the records with detailed technical and descriptive metadata: a feature which will greatly increase the retrievability of the records. Henri and Zappas relied on their knowledge of architecture students’ research needs (gleaned from experience answering reference questions) to determine the appropriate amount of descriptive data needed for each image.

Creating image records in SAHARA turned into a valuable learning experience. An unexpected, but enjoyable benefit of the research undertaken in order to describe images was the opportunity to learn about monuments and sites or the history of construction techniques and built works. The mosques of Cape Town were particularly fascinating. Describing these images involved an exploration of the history of the Bo-Kaap, or Malay Quarter, of Cape Town.

The most rewarding aspect of this project was also one of its most interesting components. Professor Upton’s wide-ranging and high quality slides offered some incredible images.  Many feature vernacular architecture or provide visual information that is not readily available elsewhere.  Making these images available, discoverable, and useful through descriptive data was a productive and satisfying project that will help enhance the teaching and study of architecture. Increasing access to these images (and as a result to architectural information) was addictive, challenging, and delightful!  We encourage other groups of faculty, librarians, and graduate students to take on similar projects and contribute further to SAHARA.

 

[i] Whiteside, Ann, “SAH Architecture Resources Archive: A Collaboration in Changing Scholarship,” Art Documentation, 28 (1) 2009; 4-8.

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