ACADI

Attended an ACADI meeting at the National Gallery yesterday. ACADI is the Association of Curators of Art & Design Images - a mutual support support group for slide librarians and visual resource curators. Unfortunately slide librarians are a bit of a dying breed as users turn to digital formats and manufacturers like Kodak stop making slide projectors. It might seem to our users that slide librarians are a bunch of complete luddites who love their slides too much to go digital, but in fact there's nothing we would like more, it's simply that there is no licence that allows us to convert our 35 mm slides into digital images - and no-one wants to be the first to be seen to be breaking the law. We have been waiting many years for DACS (the Design & Artists Copyright Society) to come up with a digital licence but just as things start to happen it all grinds to a halt again - v. frustrating.
ACADI is a fantastic group to belong to and we don't spend all of our meetings wondering when the DACS digital licence might finally happen! A couple of years ago I set up a closed Jiscmail list for the group and this has helped to open up discussions beyond the meetings. The group has also had a website for a number of years but the host institution has found it difficult to maintain so now one of the members has set up a blog for us instead - http://acadi.wordpress.com/ It's early days but this has a lot of potential to help the group and will be much easier to manage than a website - another of the advantages of Web 2.0.