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Library Film and Photography Collections are Thriving
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Added: 09/19/2005
Type: Summary
Viewed: 477 time(s)
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Library Film and Photography Collections are Thriving
The new report from Primary Research Group reports that the growth of the web has given these programs a new avenue to reach appreciative audiences, allowing them to emerge from relative scholarly obscurity. New access technologies promise to make their collections even more accessible and widely used.
The report looks at the digitization and collection development policies of leading special collections such as the Newsfilm Library at the University of South Carolina, the UCLA Film Archives, the National Archives and Records Administration Special Media Division, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archives, The University of Washington’s Digital Initiatives Program, The University of Louisville’s Photographic Archives, the American Institute of Physics Emilio Segre’ Visual Archives, the University of Utah Multimedia Archive, and the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive.
Although sources of economic support for the collections varies, most seem to be able to significantly supplement university funding with foundation and government grants, donations and for-fee services, and some obtain most of their financing in these ways.
Many have proven very clever in their pursuit of support from the local population, and have become in fundamental ways part of the community, to a far greater extent than generally the case with special scholarly collections. Another factor in the generally bright future outlook is that, for the most part, the scholarly collections profiled in this report have built their archives through donations, both solicited and unsolicited, and have been able to operate with virtually no acquisitions budgets at all.
Digitization has proceeded further in the photography than film collections. Film librarians tend to view digital production as a new medium rather than as a way to preserve older mediums, while photography librarians are most excited about the prospects it offers to expose and license their collections directly from websites.
Special collection directors are scrambling to keep up with the technology explosion in this area and much more will unfold as search engines and other web technology exploiters turn to cataloging and presenting images (and possibly film) as imaginatively as text.
Skilled staff of film and photography special collections have acquired highly specialized skill sets. Cooperation with other departments of a university, library or museum has become more practical and desirable as the staff of film and photography collections acquire unique skills in content digitization, metadata development, equipment selection and evaluation, web distribution of images, copyright clearance, Ecommerce, exhibit development and image archiving.
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