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 2024 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. The forms will not appear on this page until August 19, 2024. Similar workshops on Backing up your website/social media and Managing references and document files will be offered in the Spring 2025 semester.

All workshops will be held on a Friday from 3:00-4:30 pm in the Visual Resources Library, Hanes Art Center, Room 214, UNC-Chapel Hill, 115 South Columbia Street, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599. There will be snacks.

Workshop I September 13, 2024
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 19 at 8:00 am and will close when filled or on September 12 at 5:00 pm.

Registration is now closed.

Workshop II October 11, 2024
Managing Your Personal Image Archive with Tropy: Now that the artworks are documented, how do you find them 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? This session will introduce you to a free open-source tool for managing the many images you acquire and keep as part of researching or making art. Make order from your digital files across your computer by adding and sorting them into projects or grouping them as the same work/s. Add information to images as metadata, transcriptions, tags, and notes. Highlight and tag sections of images. Work collaboratively in the cloud on projects. You should 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 19 at 8:00 am and will close when filled or on October 10 at 5:00 pm.

Registration is now closed.

Workshop III November 15, 2024
Image Rights and Permissions: How do you navigate the rights of artists—and the photographers who document their work—in exhibitions, publications, and/or media and online? This workshop digs into copyright as it works in the US, what it protects, and when artists and scholars need to obtain permission from copyright owners. We’ll cover the public domain, the fair use doctrine, and special cases like generative AI. We’ll also walk through how to request permission for copyrighted material from creators or cultural institutions. Participants will come away from this session with a base of knowledge and resources for addressing copyright in their future projects. This will be an open forum to discuss attendees’ questions and concerns, so please submit your questions to the workshop in advance for consideration!

Registration for this workshop will open on August 19 at 8:00 am and will close when filled or on November 14 at 5:00 pm.

Registration is now closed.

Waitlist Registration

Registration for all workshops is now closed.