Information and the Art Historian: Some Notes on Herding Cats

This presentation examines the information behaviors within the realm of art history, provides a discussion of several key issues impacting art historians’ interactions with information, and offers a view of potential future information- based developments within the discipline. After an overview of the discipline and applicable models of information behaviors, the presentation will examine information bottlenecks, particularly those surrounding visual information. The
presentation closes with suggestions concerning ways to support art historians, and a discussion of the role that information professionals play in the development of the discipline.

Dr. Joan E. Beaudoin, an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University, teaches and performs research on metadata, information organization, digital libraries, digital preservation, and the access to and use of visual information. Prior to her appointment at Wayne State
University her career included archaeological fieldwork, art history teaching, and the curation of visual resources. Her research has been published in a number of scholarly journals, including the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Documentation, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Knowledge Organization, and Art Documentation, and she has presented at conferences including those of the Association for Information Science and Technology, the Association for College and Research Libraries, the College Art Association, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, and the Visual Resources Association.