Wednesday 21 March 2012

Slide Library - Josie Cawdry

The visual resource centre houses one of the most extensive slide libaries in the uk. John Davies (j.davies@mmu.ac.uk) gave a breif talk about the history of the collection and gave us the opportunity to look through some slides and find ones that strongly drew our attention.7

The Collection comprisions of 3 seperate parts

  • Art/design slide collection
  • Design council slide collection
  • Lanten slide collection

The slides are individaully labeled, with each slide being given a code number and specific letter.

The team in charge of the collection have began the painstaking task of making each and every slide electronically avaliable. To view a selection of the slides online visit www.flickr.com/photos/mmuvisualresorces

The average slide size is 24mm x 36mm, they are housed within plastic wallets and then stored in order of codes inside filing cabinets.

The slides were originally ised within the university for lectures and the images were projected for the viewing audience via special large scale projectors.

"the slide library, a one stop shop for images to use in lectures" John Davies

Originally slides were named 'Lantern slides' and were much bigger than other slides, measuring in at 3 inches. The film was sandwiched between 2 sheets of glass. In 1966, these type of slides begn to get phased out and the industry moved onto the more appropriate 35mm film (a thin flex sheet of film), which is still used today.

At present the future of the slide library in unsure, late last summer, the collection was moved from its original home, on the ground floor of cavendish and was scattered around the art building, posing problems for student and access.

With approximately 275,000 slides in the collection the issue arises as to where the collection will be housed when the old school moved to the new school in december 2012.

The collection has been growing since the 1960's and includes everything from art, arcitechure, fashion, teaching and the city of manchester. The collection is built up from proffesional photographer slides aswell as amatuer images donated to the school of art.

Below is a list of where some of the slides were sources from -

  • Books
  • Commercially produced merchandise
  • Postcards
  • Original in-house photography
  • Original filmstrips

20,000 of the slides document the history of the school of art and date back to 1959.

If you wish to view the gallery, visit John on the ground floor of cavendish. (next to the weave room)

No comments:

Post a Comment