This is to thank the many fine librarians who took the time recently to reply with indepth eloquent responses espousing the virtues, depth & breadth of their very inexpensive Vertical File/Artist File collections. It was tremendously reassuring to realize that so many professionals of far superior credentials & libraries/museums find the work involved in maintaining these very unique & valuable, if ephemeral, resources to be highly worthwhile & in fact necessary to the functioning of their museums & libraries. The costs & staff time for acquiring (usually free materials), cataloging (minimal in most cases), & the "shelf space" is minimal in relation the number of items/topics covered per inch are a small fraction of that for books. Vertical Files are ideal for coverage of artists/topics unavailable in book format, contemporary artists/movements especially, or topics outside those collected in the more expensive formats. Maintaining files on regional artists & artists within a museum's collections was especially viewed as critical to the functioning of a museum & a mandate for regional museums, as the materials would not be collected elsewhere otherwise. Some Museums had collections of 20-30,000 files & more!
Cataloging/access varied from lists of artists & subjects covered to detailed OPAC cataloging. Some picture/image files were even to be digitized eventually.
Should anyone wish to read the responses in depth, I can forward them to you as an email. Some also detail hours of service, staffing, etc. for purposes of comparison.
Thank you all so very much for your professional & morale support & encouragement. Should we need to defend the existence of our current collection further, we have many highly respected colleagues & institutions to whose collections are enviable. Thus armored we can solicit the support of our staff & patrons with confidence as well & surely prevail. With sincere gratitude,
Rebecca D. Steel, Librarian
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Library
314 South Park Street
Kalamazoo, MI 49007-5102
(616) 349-7775, x3165
FAX: (616) 349-9313
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http://www.kiarts.org
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