FROM SLIDE LIBRARIES TO JPEG FILE LIBRARIES

Greta Kuriger LIS 501 December 2, 2009

What’s in a name?

“The name ‘library’ has lost its etymologic meaning and means not a collection of books, but the central agency for disseminating information, innocent recreation, or best of all, inspiration among people. Whenever this can be done better, more quickly or cheaply by a picture than a book, the picture is entitled to a place on the shelves and in the catalog.”

-Melvil Dewey 1906

Art history and the slide library

“Art history is a history of the artifact, and any slide or image memorized in a class serves, Haskins explains, as a ‘simulacrum with a sense of the value of the original, the ‘ding an sich,’ or ‘the thing itself.’ There are so many ways to understand the physicality of these objects.’ Analog formats like the lantern slide are kept less for art history scholars interested in the artifact, but for scholars interested in the history of art history—what Haskins describes as the ‘historiography of art history at Yale,’ as she returns the lantern slide to its drawer with a sentimental smile. Though the lantern slide serves as a simulacrum of its image, it is also its own historical object, its own ‘ding an sich’ worthy of study. The artifact presently being created by Yale’s hardworking librarians is a digital database, and in one sense is just another simulacrum— a sprawling two-dimensional image of the sprawling library itself.” 

- Adriane Quinlan

Definition of Slide Library

A library that houses a collection of photographic slides. Slides most often take the form of a 35mm slide or lantern slide.

Part of a larger library or stand alone within a larger organization

academic department of a college or university museum corporation

Contain slides depicting  artwork architecture cultural objects

Definition of Slide Libraries

Used for the study, teaching, and documentation of 

art history architectural history visual culture biology and other sciences corporate information such as publications and

history

Also served as archive for photographic records of objects

Evolution of Technology

Lantern slides 35mm slides Digital Images

Magic Lantern Slides

Originally to tell stories, some included text with pictures – precursor to motion pictures and television –- http://www.luikerwaal.com/indexx_uk.htm.

This tradition of storytelling comes from hundreds of years of telling stories using props such as candles, hand puppets, and silhouettes.

Devices such as the Magic Lantern saw

the shift from hand painted glass slides

to machine produced slides in the 1800s. Would provide mass entertainment. 30k –

60k showmen in the United States in 1895.

- http://www.victoriana.com/MagicLantern/magiclanternshows.htm

Lantern Slides

Prevalent in schools and museums from the late 1800s until the 1960s.

35mm Slides

magic lantern slides “ ‘were outmoded in the 1950s or 1960s,’ ‘But color wasn’t always spot on with the 35mm slides, so in most cases they stuck with lantern slides for a few years. In some ways,’ she reflects, ‘this is how we think of digital media.’” -Quinlan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWyLaXCV2_s – Mad Men clip The carousel stopped being made in 2004 At Yale The basement’s pride and joy was Kodak

scanner that scanned an entire carousel at a rate of 85 slides per hour. - Quinlan

Reasons to hate the 35mm slide

The projector with its ever-lurking unreliability – blown bulbs, damaged slide tray, bent slides, controller malfunction, upside down / backward images due to improper slide loading, loud

Slides – flammable, difficult to produce and to make copies, images fade

-A.D. Coleman

Change at the ClevelandMuseum of Art

Changes

Going digital has led to a huge amount of changes.

Institutions – addition of archives, public libraries

Classification – metadata standards (VRA Core 4.0)

Space – less physical space; people don’t need to go to the library anymore

Time – less spent on preparing image, more on access

Going digital - issues

What’s on-line is a small portion of a collection, it is unrepresentative of the whole

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Over 2 million objects in museum’s

collection 138,913 images on their website 8,700 images on ARTstor

Going digital - issues

Copyright issues have come into play with digital images in a big way.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art: “digital copyright restrictions are much more

stringent than those for slides, and thus access to projectible images is limited to users within the CMA network, i.e., CMA staff and CWRU faculty and students.” p.119

“whereas slides could be circulated like books, digital image restrictions, whether from the CMA or vendors, limit the use of those images to within the CMA computer network.” p.123

-Benedetti

Cleveland Museum of Art 2006

The Image Services department provides the following services:

Scanning 35mm slides Digitally photographing or scanning images from

books Scanning transparencies, negatives, and film

prints Converting, resizing, and cleaning digital images Transfer requested images to CD (licensing) Creating PowerPoint presentations of images

requested

Competencies

Format knowledge Collection development Classification and cataloging Technology Reference and research Communication, collaboration, outreach Planning and management Theoryhttp://www.lib.lsu.edu/SAA/VRCC.pdf

Professional Associations

ARLIS / NA – Art Libraries Society of North America

VRA – Visual Resources Association CAA – College Art Association SLA – Special Library Association

Quid Tum?

Even with copyright issues we could see more collaboration and sharing happening – Flickr.com (for profit) and ARTstor.org (non profit)

As of Aug. 19, 2009 ARTstor had over 1 million images, as of October flickr had 4 billion +

ARTstor sees itself “as a digital ‘workspace’ which, through its unique combination of collections and tools, helps to facilitate education and scholarship.”

“challenges on several fronts—including technical infrastructure, metadata schema, controlled vocabularies, cataloging standards, digitization specifications, digital preservation policies, and intellectual property laws. The effort to provide seamless, integrated online access to large aggregations of visual resources in digital form is only in its very early stage of development.”

“We need to foster new kinds of serendipity.”

-Christine Kuan

ARTstor

Librarians need to stay flexible

The name “slide library” is no longer an appropriate term to describe the image collections of today, but the idea and main mission of the collection is still the same – to educate, inform, inspire, and spread knowledge of history, other cultures, and people today through the use of images. The new diversity of roles is seen in the name changes – slide libraries to image banks, visual resource collections etc. and this is also seen with librarians taking on new branding as information professionals.

Bibliography A Brief History of the Magic Lantern -

http://toytheatre.info/Magic/History.html  Benedetti, Joan M. Art Museum Libraries and

Librarianship. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2007.

 Coleman, A.D. “Kodachrome Footnote: Bye-bye Slide Projector . . .”, Photocritic International: A.D. Coleman and Related Matters. July 9, 2009. [Blog - http://nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/?p=628]

 Irvine, Betty Jo and P. Eileen Fry. Slide Libraries: A Guide for Academic Institutions, Museums, and Special Collections. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, Inc. 1979.

 Iyer, Hemalata. “Core Competencies for Visual Resources Management” http://www.lib.lsu.edu/SAA/VRCC.pdf

 Kuan, Christine. “ARTstor: Collections and the New Curatorial Workspace.” August 19, 2009.

http://www.ifla.org/files/art-libraries/kuan-artstor-collections-curatorial-workspace.pdf

 Kwan, Billy C.H. “Implementing a Digital Asset Management System at the Met” 2007. http://www.vraweb.org/conferences/vra25/sessions/data_migration/kwan.pdf

 Quinlan, Adriane. Virtually Everything: To digitize a library is a monumental task, and we’re just getting started. The New Journal. Yale. 2005. http://www.yale.edu/tnj/content/feb06/virtuallyeverything.html

 Victoriana “Magic Lantern Shows: Yesterday and Today” - http://www.victoriana.com/MagicLantern/magiclanternshows.htm

. VRA Core - http://www.vraweb.org/projects/vracore4/

Slide 3 Wimbledon College of Art -

http://www.wimbledon.arts.ac.uk/31807.htm Massachusetts College of Art by Ms. HC at flickr.com -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7589956@N06/3658662220

Mary Beth Coghill, Western Washington University slide library - http://www.flickr.com/photos/marybethsc/2943130795/in/photostream/

 Slide 6 Walter McClintock Lantern Slide from the Yale

Collection of Western Americana - http://preservemontanalanguages.pbworks.com/Pronunciation+Guides

Planck Magic Lantern - http://www.luikerwaal.com/indexx_uk.htm

 Slide 8 Cleveland Museum of Art Lantern slides with female

librarian 1941 - http://library.clevelandart.org/focus/200905.php

 Slide 12 Cleveland Museum of Art slide library 1984 -

http://library.clevelandart.org/images/focus/2009_05/zoom/09.jpg

Cleveland Museum of Art Lantern slide list of images c. 1930s - http://library.clevelandart.org/focus/200905.php

Cleveland Museum of Art Image services 2006 name change - http://library.clevelandart.org/focus/200905.php

copy stand= http://www.lochnessproductions.com/pltref/plt101/slide_workshop/workshop.html

 Slide 20 –ARTstor accessed 12/2/2009 -http://library.artstor.org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/library/welcome.html#3|search|1|magic20lantern|Multiple20Collection20Search|||type3D3126kw3Dmagic20lantern26id3Dall26name3D