Faculty
Alison Langmead
Joint appointment as Director of the Visual Media Workshop and as Lecturer in the Archives, Preservation and Records Management Program in the School of Information Sciences
Constellation(s): Contemporaneity, Mobility/Exchange, Visual Knowledge
Alison Langmead holds a joint faculty appointment between the School of Arts & Sciences and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. During her career, she has always made a concerted effort to combine her enthusiasm for academic work with an equally strong drive to use her theoretical research in daily practice. This joint appointment reflects this goal.
For the Department of Art History and Architecture, Alison serves as the Director of the Visual Media Workshop (VMW). The mission of the VMW is to develop and encourage the creation of innovative methods for producing, disseminating and preserving the multimedia presentation of academic work. To achieve these objectives, she is currently designing a technologically-focused environment of collaboration and creativity where the University community can gather to create, share and preserve the visual presentation of their academic work.
For the School of Information Sciences, Alison serves as a faculty member within the Archives, Preservation and Records Management track of the Library and Information Sciences program. In her academic research, she is working on teasing out the nature of the relationship between the practice of active information management and the archival profession, both as a historical narrative and as a complex, changing process in contemporary America. This research, plus all of the theories, concepts and models that she teaches at SIS, are put into daily practice in her work at the VMW.
Education
PhD, Columbia University
MLIS, University of California at Los Angeles
Recent Presentations
"Librarians, Filers or Archivists?: The Construction of the American Records Management Profession." Paper to be presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists, Chicago, Illinois, August 2011.
"Filing as a Profession and a Calling in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." Paper presented at the Archival Education and Research Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, July 2011.
"From Slides to Digital Assets: A Conversation about the Future of Visual Resource Management." Lecture given as part of the History of Art and Architecture Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh, September 2009.
"Modern Perspectives on the Relationship between Archives and Records Management." Session organized and chaired at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists, San Francisco, California, August 2008.
"Constructing Sustainability: Real-World Implementations of Preservation Standards for Born-Digital Design Documentation." Session organized for the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists, Chicago, Illinois, August 2007.
"Is There Such a Thing as Digital Image Permanence?" Mini-Seminar presented at the 2006 American Institute of Architects National Convention in association with Esto Photographics, Los Angeles, California, June 2006.
