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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 SchulerAga Khan Documentation Center, MIT LibrariesMarch 12, 2015

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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Disposal

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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

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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

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Thank you!

aschuler@mit.edu