Slides Libary Lecture- The visual research centre, John Davis. Image collections.
I attended the 'slides libary collection' this week and found all the slides and history behind them, really interesting. Years ago, they were put onto a projector and displayed on a wall usually to teach students in large lecture theatres. However, you could change the size of the slide which was really handy if you taught different size groups of students.
The question asked during the lecture was 'Will the slides be kept or will digital imagiry take over?'. My opinion was that in the end digital imagery will take over as it is easier to search on the web as it is to find specific slides relating to your subject of talk. I think we are very lucky as students to still be able to get out hands on these slides and use them in our project, even if it was just to draw from and develop ideas, it's a help towards our final outcome. John Davis said there is approximately 275,000 slides all dating back and collected since 1960's. Covering a wide art and design base, the slides have been built up over 50 years.
The collection was a fundemental part of the Art school as it was vital for these slides to be shown to cover all parts of the curriculum. However, 'slides' are objects and have to be stored in safe places, for example, filing cabinets. They have specific categories and even sub categories, so they are easier to find as there is so many of them. Even though there are places and categories for the slides to be found, it still takes a longer amount of time to put the slide shows together, than it would to prepare a lecture on your laptop all based on digital imagery found on google. However, there are elements of 'random' when you type a subject title into google, and you never really know what information is true unlike the specific categories which are kept in the filing cabinets.
Slides came from postcards, out of books, magazines and some were bought for just 20p! Some of them were even bought as film strips and shown to save time projecting each slide one by one.
There are 20,000slides which record variousaspects of the school of art, so i really recommend going having a word with John Davis to see if you can arrange some viewings of these specific slides as it would relate well to your choosen topic and would be really interesting to see how the school has developed over time; and how we have the ability to change it even more.
Or visit: http://flickr.com/photos/mmuvisualresources/. you can have access to, and download images off this site to use in our project. However, the pictures on this website are of low res, see John to access slides of a higher res. He is available Monday-Friday and you are able to borrow 25 slides at a time. This may really help with your projects!