Visual literacy is an evolving concept. As the world becomes more and more filled with visual materials everyday, visual literacy will become more and more important. People need knowledge and education that will help them “effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media.” Libraries are responsible for supporting this kind of learning.
The term “visual literacy” was first introduced by John Debes, Coordinator of Education Projects at Eastman Kodak Company, in 1968. He explained that people needed visual literacy because they were living in a “more visual environment” than earlier generations. Archivists have been using this term since the nineteen-nineties in reference to reading photographs. The Society of American Archivists notes that visual literacy is “the ability to 'read' an image and connotes the ability to understand an image as more than the appearance of things.” Today, visual literacy is seen as being so crucial that the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) list visual literacy as an essential element for all 21st century learners.
Now that the importance of visual literacy is so widely recognized, how can libraries help further people’s understanding of visual materials?
I think that one of the biggest challenges to visual literacy is building the structure to support this kind of learning. According to the ACRL, “Visual literacy education is typically a collaborative endeavor, involving faculty, librarians, curators, archivists, visual resources professionals, and learning technologists.” It is not the responsibility of just one department or discipline or group; there are a lot of people who need to work together to develop visual literacy.
First of all, libraries need to do more faculty outreach to support visual literacy. Without buy in from teachers and faculty, visual literacy will not improve. In the same way that faculty are using other primary sources, there need to be assignments based on using visual materials so that students can become comfortable working with these materials. One way that librarians and archivists can facilitate this is by keeping faculty informed about what resources are available and relevant to their courses. Whether it is by informal chats or email updates or newsletters, it is important to communicate with faculty and try to help them integrate more visual materials into their teaching.
Next, in order for libraries to provide this service, library staff need to be trained in visual literacy. There needs to be reference training and services, systems development, digitization services and archival training in order for libraries to really support visual literacy.
Reference staff need to be trained about various aspects of visual literacy. Reference staff need an introduction and workshops to inform them about what visual literacy is plus they need to be educated about various visual resources and databases that are available. Some reference staff are already educated in this area but it seems that they are few and far between. This a really great library guide that helps inform users about various aspects of using images in research: Library Guide to Using Images. The librarians who designed this guide to using images included local databases, images by subject, copyright free images, search strategies, image analysis, citation & copyright and tools to help users. There are also additional resources for faculty listed. This is one of the few comprehensive resources that I found on a library website. In order to develop visual literacy, reference staff need to be informed about visual literacy.
Systems staff need to build programs and install software that enable more visually oriented learning. For example, it is possible for systems staff to allow users to build and share collections of visual materials. Researchers who are using materials can group items and create “sequences” of materials that can be shared with other researchers.
Quality digitization of materials is necessary so that people can view items online. Digitization makes it so that images have a much larger audience. Plus, digitization can allow for advances in scholarship. People can develop programs like this one: http://tineye.com/ that help people understand where an image came from and also how people are using it. I tried it on a number of different photographs. The system recognizes some of the images that I uploaded but not all. There are over 4 billion images already indexed and there are more and more each day, so I think that this will just get more useful. Here is one example that I found that had some interesting results:
This photograph of Miles Davis came back with 87 different websites that are using it. You can find sites ranging from a jazz radio station website to blogs to Flickr to the BBC and much more. If someone were studying Miles Davis, this could be a really useful tool, and moreso once more scholarly collections are indexed. Digitization can enhance research in a number of ways and it plays a big part in visual literacy.
As we learned in class, archives do not usually spend a lot of time working with individual photographs. In order to encourage visual literacy, archives need to give photographs and visual materials more attention. Archivists need to be trained to read photograph on a number of levels. They need to be able to tell the historical context of a photograph and also whether or not the photograph has artistic elements. This kind of description will help users better understand what is going on in a photograph. Further, archivists need to be trained in visual literacy. If archivists know more about visual literacy and its desired outcomes, they can work with faculty, reference staff, systems and digitization staff to integrate materials into the classroom and digital collections. Plus, archives can “promote a symbiotic relationship with researchers” and have researchers help enhance catalog records and sequences of images. Researchers are already spending time studying materials so archivist can work with researchers to enrich library materials.
Visual literacy is accepted as a critical part of the learning process in today’s world but in order to realize this goal, major changes need to take place. If you look at the desired learning outcomes associated with visual literacy from the ACRL at the bottom of this page: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy, you will see that this is not an easy goal to reach. This requires coordinating a lot of work from a number of different groups of people.
Works Cited:
Association Of College And Research Libraries. (2011, October). ACRL visual literacy competency standards for higher education. Retrieved from Association of College and Research Libraries website: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy
Debes, J. L. (1968). Some foundations for visual literacy. Audiovisual Instruction, 13, 961-964.
Pearce-Moses, R. (2013, ). Visual literacy. Retrieved from A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology website: http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/v/visual-literacy
Malkmus, D. (2010). "Old stuff" for new teaching methods: Outreach to history faculty teaching with primary sources.Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 10(4), 415-435. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.bc.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v010/10.4.malkmus.html
Lesy, M. (2007). Visual literacy. Journal of American History, 94, 143-153. Retrieved from http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/americanfaces/lesy.html
Kaplan, E., & Mifflin, J. (1996). “Mind and sight”: Visual literacy and the archivist*. Archival Issues, 1, 107-127. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.proxy.bc.edu/stable/41101943
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