VRA 2015 35mm slides Case studies Schuler

Editor's Notes

• #2: 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.
• #3: 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.
• #4: 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.
• #5: New sets of weeding criteria were developed.
• #7: 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.
• #8: 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.