Annual Report (2002)
Wittenborn Award Committee, ARLIS/NA

February 3, 2003

The 2002 Wittenborn Award Committee members were: Angelica Lopez (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library), Dawn Henney (UCLA Arts Library), Susan Flanagan (Research Library, The Getty Research Institute), and Nancy Norris (UCLA Research Library), Chair. Deborah Barlow Smedstad (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) was forced to withdraw. The budget for FY 2002 was approved in the amount of $775.00. 

The Call for Submissions was mailed from Headquarters the first week in October to over 300 publishers. Headquarters reported very few mailings were returned as undeliverable. This year, the mailing included the call and the cover letter translated into Spanish. Prior to this year they were only in English and in French. The committee thanks Gladys Markoff-Sotomayor for providing the translations and Pedro Figueredo for his work proofing and insuring the diacritics formatted properly. These and the updated publishers list will be forwarded to the 2003 committee chair, Kraig Binkowski, Delaware Art Museum.              .

The Call was also posted on ARLIS-L with a final reminder of the due date posted in early December. The list generated some member nominations and a lovely message from Willem A. Donkert in The Netherlands who recalled that November 20, 2002 was exactly forty years to the day that he first began working with George Wittenborn at 1018 Madison Avenue, what it meant to him, and how proud he is that George Wittenborn is honored with a prize.  

116 submissions were received from publishers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The committee thanks Beverly Karno for her help in verifying addresses and encouraging submissions. Nine submissions were disqualified for reasons of publication date. The committee met several times in January for final deliberations and selected one winner:

Alfred Stieglitz: the Key Set by Sarah Greenough

The Chair has contacted both the author and the publisher. The committee will continue its work on publicity including writing a press release for dissemination by Headquarters at the time of the conference and preparing slides for the award ceremony. The list of winners on the ARLIS-L web site will be updated. We understand that Headquarters will arrange for a table to exhibit the award-winning book in the Exhibits area at the Baltimore conference. The Chair is pursuing the idea of a one-page interview with the winning author, to appear in Art Doc, as well as a possible book signing at the conference.  

Submitted by Nancy Norris, Chair
UCLA Research Library
nnorris@library.ucla.edu
(310) 206-5853