It is with very mixed feelings that I announce Anna Fishaut is leaving the Art & Architecture Library after seven and a half years of service. Anna is targeting a new career in user experience design and will embark on a course in San Francisco to obtain the necessary training and credentials.

Anna has excelled in web design and assessment, serving as a key player in the redesign of the SUL website. Besides recreating the site for the Art & Architecture Library, Anna provided invaluable feedback to the SUL web development team on issues relating to site design and the presentation of visual materials. She also served on the Online Experience Group from its early days.

Remarkable as it may be, it is not the list of her achievements per se that is so impressive as the number of faculty and students at Stanford, across the disciplines, that have benefited from Anna’s performance as our Assistant Art Librarian. Anna has been a prime figure in our transition to a more dynamic research presence on campus. She has overseen our exhibition program, producing shows of student designed chairs, artists' and photography books, as well as more thematically curated exhibitions drawn on the great materials housed in our Art Locked Stacks collections. By my last count, Anna curated or installed thirty exhibitions! She has formulated the concept for an excellent opening exhibition for our new McMurtry space on the notion of "Home." I hope we can still do this show, and do it justice.

In terms of instruction, Anna annually leads or assists dozens of classes in presentations of materials from the Art Locked Stack collections, or in bibliographic instruction, including PWR1 & PWR2 classes. A major initiative relating to object-based instruction using illuminated manuscript facsimiles winter quarter alone has Anna working closely with three different courses, coordinating access to over fifty facsimiles.

Besides serving as our bibliographer for Casalini and AMALIVRE orders on the history of art, architecture, and design, Anna also brought in major acquisitions for the Art Locked Stacks collection, and led or assisted in the acquisition of archive and manuscript collections for Special Collections. Recently she brought in New Langton Arts records, 1975-2010, Tragic Book project archive, and the donor supported Christopher Wilde/Artichoke Yink press collections.

Anna's last day is Friday, Feb. 27. During this period, please continue to contact her as you would normally with any requests for purchases, instruction, reference queries, etc. Anna and I will orchestrate any necessary hand-offs behind the scenes.

Please join me in wishing Anna the absolute best as she embarks on this new career path. If past is prologue, she will no doubt succeed.

Peter Blank

Head, Art & Architecture Library