Dear colleagues
I hope you are having a good term. Now the mad rush is abating slightly….
Those of you on the VRA list will have read about all the slides being dumped in the US. At the bottom of this email is a lovely way of seeing off a collection….but…..
I have raised this idea before and would like to get some idea of support for it amongst our community.
The idea is to preserve a specimen Slide Library in its physical form pre the sort of weeding going on in UK collections as slide libraries are seen as redundant and space hungry. The justification I would make is sketched out below :
The Slide Library as it developed up to the present day here (and I think this is the case in most art schools) reflected both the history of the teaching of art history in Art schools and the history of the reproduced art history image. In my collection the oldest slides are of classical art and art of ancient civilizations and big names in Renaissance Art (the concept of masterpieces) and then progress through to art of nineteenth century France (the O and A level syllabus continued into HE), we start to see an interest developing in German art (especially in the angst ridden 1980's) and in women artists (feminism post Griselda Pollock). Finer publishing started to give us better slides, Design History was invented, Ceramic History and Theory started to be addressed, the stories my slide Collection can tell are manifold. Even the history of the Slide Librarian can be traced from early bought in slides, through badly labelled in house slides through to improvements in labelling and classification and the computerisation that then came. This can be read by looking at the surface of the slides.
So does anyone think we should be thinking of preserving a Slide Collection for posterity (in all its glory, including the pink slides)
If so please can you let me know? What other arguments would you make to support the idea? Or if you feel strongly that we should not bother I would also love to hear those arguments tooI have to write a report soon on the future of my collection
Many thanks in advance
Jenny Godfrey
Information Advisor and Visual Resources
Library & Information Services
Cardiff Metropolitan University
Howard Gardens Campus
Cardiff CF24 0SP
: 029 2041 6662
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: Cardiff Metropolitan University
blog: http://artdesarc.blogspot.com/
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