VRA 2015 35mm slides Case studies Schuler
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•568 views
Presented by Andrea Schuler at the Annual Conference of the Visual Resources Association, March 10-15, 2015, in Denver, Colorado. Session 5: What Do We Do With All These Slides? Case Studies ORGANIZER: Dawn Feavyour, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL MODERATOR: Maureen Burns, IMAGinED Consulting, CA PRESENTERS: Maureen Burns, IMAGinED Consulting, CA Dawn Feavyour, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL Karen Kessel, Sonoma State University, CA Randi Millman-Brown, Ithaca College, NY Andrea Schuler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Marsha Taichman, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY "What do we do with all these slides?" is a question frequently encountered by VRA members during the last several years. Various case studies, representing different scenarios, stages, processes and outcomes, will address this question, offering suggestions that may include archiving, digitizing, disposing, and/or recycling of 35 mm slides, in addition to ideas for re-purposing the spaces left behind by slide collections.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to VRA 2015 35mm slides Case studies Schuler
Similar to VRA 2015 35mm slides Case studies Schuler (20)
More from Visual Resources Association
More from Visual Resources Association (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
VRA 2015 35mm slides Case studies Schuler
- 1. AKDC@MIT VRA 2014 Session 5: What Do We Do With All These Slides?: Case Studies What do I do with 380,000 slides?? A case study of the MIT Libraries 35mm slide weeding project Andrea Schuler Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries March 12, 2015
- 2. AKDC@MIT MIT’s collection: • 380,000 slides, or approximately 4,200 linear feet • 30% Visual Arts, 70% Built Environment • 70% of the overall collection estimated to be copywork
- 3. AKDC@MIT Pilot Study: Phase 1 – Summer 2011 • Focused on the Visual Arts section, 30% of the total collection • 2 part-time staff devoted approximately 450 hours • 2 different processes used Method 1 Method 2 295 hours 144 hours 127.3 linear feet processed 239.5 linear feet processed Not sustainable!
- 4. AKDC@MIT Phase 2 Weeding criteria (Visual Arts & Built Environment): For all categories, discard: • Poor quality slides, including discolored, faded, out of focus, moldy, etc. • Duplicate/similar images, unless they show change in a site or work of art over time • Copy work already digitized • Vendor slides that cannot be digitized For the Visual Arts, keep: • Original photography • High quality gift slides, even if they are copy work, and copy work images that are valuable/relevant to our curriculum, if they would be difficult to obtain again or are unlikely to be found in comparable collections • Images related to MIT history For the Built Environment, keep: • Plans and drawings • Original photography • High quality gift slides, even if they are copy work, if they would be difficult to obtain again • High-quality copy work for monuments/areas of the world that are poorly documented • Maps & plans of cities • Aerial views • All images related to cities/areas important to the curriculum, used actively by our faculty, or that document areas of great change: Massachusetts, New York, Italy, Rust Belt cities, etc. • Student work
- 5. AKDC@MIT Results! • Phase 1 Pilot project ran 15 weeks over the summer beginning in May 2011, and sporadically until the end of the year • Phase 2 ran from January until September 2012 • From May 2011-June 2012, ~950 staff hours were spent weeding • ~1/3 of the total collection was retained
- 7. AKDC@MIT Now what? We will digitize: • Good quality plans of significant sites and sites that we already have images for • Original photography of good quality that is from an MIT scholar, has documentation of reproduction rights, or is from a noted scholar • Original photography that we do not have reproduction rights for if it is good quality and documents a site not well-documented elsewhere, or documents change of a monument over time We will discard: • Plans of minor sites that we have no images for and could easily be found again if necessary • Poor quality or discolored slides, along with slides that duplicate/are similar to images already in the collection • Images that we have no reproduction rights to, or right to make openly available, and that document sites that are widely documented elsewhere
- 8. AKDC@MIT What did we learn? • Establish very specific criteria at the start of the project • This is not a perfect process and there will be ambiguity • There is a lot of important material in these collections, and some you can feel genuinely okay about getting rid of • Keep the faculty informed and involved • Document the process, and consider how you can preserve your institution’s history
Editor's Notes
- I’m the Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Architecture at MIT. As part of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, I manage the various visual collections at MIT relating to the Islamic world, including 35 mm slides.
- Beginning in the 1960s, Rotch Visual Collections at MIT began collecting 35mm slides in support of the Architecture department, eventually amassing a teaching collection of about 380,000 slides by the time the last one was added to the collection in 2006. The collection was about 30% visual arts slides and 70% built environment slides. The slides of the Islamic world fell nearly entirely into the built environment section and made up about 20% of that section. In 2010, in response to dwindling circulation numbers and a request from library administration to reduce the physical footprint of the collection, a proposal to weed the teaching collection was written. No specific reduction target or timeline was given. Faculty were notified that this project would be beginning and were asked for suggestions of unique material they knew could be found in the collection, which they were very supportive of.
- We hired a temp to work 15 hours/week exclusively on the weeding project, and visual collections assistant devoted 8-10 hours to the project each week. During the built environment portion of the project, I spent somewhere between 5-10 hours a week focusing on the Islamic portion of slides, as my schedule allowed. In phase 1 in the summer of 2011, staff focused on the visual arts section of the collection. Two different weeding processes ended up being used over this first period. The initial workflow was to look at each slide individually and check our digital collections, Artstor, etc., to see if a digital surrogate existed. If one did not exist, we verified that the library still owned the book that it was scanned from. Assuming a digital surrogate or the library book could be found, the slide would be discarded. That took an enormous amount of time and was not sustainable for the size of our collection, especially since the vast majority of the slides ended up being discarded anyway. After several weeks of this process, we switched directions and arrived at the method that would be used throughout the rest of the project.
- New sets of weeding criteria were developed.
- At the recommendation of legal council, because the vast majority of the slides were either copywork or vendor slides, which had copyright concerns, our discarded slides were thrown away. At the beginning of the project, we did consider the possibility of boxing up everything and storing it off-site, but that ultimately seemed costly and left the slides essentially inaccessible anyway. It would be a better use of resources to weed them thoroughly, keep the valuable stuff on site, and then get rid of the rest. The initial process was to shift the slides around in each individual drawer, with the ones marked for disposal separated from those we’d be keeping. The slides to be discarded sat in the drawers for the entire weeding process, which gave time to go back to them if necessary and reevaluate. Because of the huge scale of the project, we didn’t record at an item-level which slides were discarded. At the end of the project, all of the slides marked for deaccession were pulled and picked up by MIT hazardous waste. The slide cabinets were sold by MIT surplus.
- The remaining slide cabinets were shifted around and new staff office space was created in the areas that were freed up. But we’re still left with over 100,000 slides, still a considerable collection. As we were weeding, we were working on the assumption that any slides kept would someday be candidates for digitization, or may ultimately still be discarded without digitizing. I developed a set of criteria for what I would digitize, and discard from the remaining slides, and determined where in the collection to start making selections for digitization. For the first pass, focus was on slides that document sites and topics taught in one specific faculty member’s classes who had been the most instrumental in building up the Islamic sections. For my second pass, slides were pulled and evaluated based on an existing list of core monuments in Islamic architecture. Going forward, since large chunks of the collection have already been dealt with, I’m going to start at the beginning of the slide drawers in the Islamic section and work my way through in the order the slides sit in the drawers. For the time being, I’m keeping any slides that I’ve digitized as part of this process, but am discarding anything that I’ve not selected for digitization at this time, since I’m confident it truly is a poor quality slide or is an image that could easily be found elsewhere in the future if necessary.