[Extract from paper delivered at event “Photographic Archives, Technologies, and Methods of Recording”, 20 Feb 2013, The John Rylands Library, https://archiveinterventions.wordpress.com/conference-event-feb-2013/ ]
As I’m writing this I’m sat in a basement of the Mansfield Cooper building, the home of Art History & Visual Studies; I’m surrounded by shelves, boxes, papers, equipment for measuring, equipment for viewing; and by cabinets – 55 of them, containing approximately 160, 000 35mm slides, collected over a 30 year period. For now this is the final resting place of a collection and archive which was destined to be chucked, dumped in a skip to make room for more tables and chairs.
But I’m jumping ahead of myself … Let me return to the very start of the boldly named ‘Archive Intervention’ project and to the start of the problem: a collection under threat of being broken up – so-called old and decrepit technology being replaced…
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