Hi Ruth
We have 54 vertical filing cabinets of pamphlets, clippings,
letters,bibliographies compiled by staff of material not indexed anywhere
else and other ephemera on artists (mostly Canadian), buildings,
architects, community planning concepts and designers. The files were
started in the mid 1950s.
At one point we weeded the pre 1960s material on community and regional
planning and put this in our rare book area in a separate vertical
file. These items are so marked.
There is a card catalogue listing planning pamphlets and fully indexing
exhibition catalogues found in these files. These records have not been
converted to the online catalogue as yet.
There are, however, entries online for the files on Canadian artists added
from the mid 1980s to the end of the 1990s. These entries give the
location and the name of the file folder, ie. Carr, Emily.
Until the mid 1990s we clipped the local papers, making a copy for each
artist mentioned in an article. We stopped doing this when we discovered
online indexes that included newspapers, especially full text versions.
We do, however, continue to clip neighbourhood newspapers that are not
indexed elsewhere. We clip only articles on artists, architects or
buildings.
Useage:
We found that as soon as some of the files were listed online, there was a
lot of use.
Also, as the files on Canadian artists are part of CHIN (Canadian Heritage
Info. Network) "Artists in Canada" database, we get email and phone
requests from across Canada for information from our files.
Future:
We have thought of listing more files, of making inventories, of
transcribing our staff bibliographies of unindexed material and, of
course, of weeding.
The files are not growing much, so space is not a problem yet.
Problem
With more use, we have lost more. From time to time in the past, the files
have been locked and people must request. For the past few years the files
have been unlocked and people help themselves. And they do. We have lost
valuable files on important Canadian artists such as Jeff Wall and Tom
Thomson.
Hope our experience helps you out.
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Diana E.M. Cooper 604-822-3943
Fine Arts Reference Librarian
Fine Arts Library
University of British Columbia
1956 Main Mall [log in to unmask]
On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Ruth Wallach wrote:
> I would appreciate your comments on the following questions regarding
> vertical files in libraries -
>
> 1. Has electronic access to image and text databases changed the nature of
> the vertical file collection?
>
> 2. If your institution has an electronic finding aid for the vertical file,
> has this affected usage of the collection?
>
> 3. Does anyone collect born-digital ephemera? If yes, what's your experience?
>
> I am not interested in hard numbers as much as in perceptions and
> sensibilities.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Ruth Wallach
> University of Southern California
>
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>
__________________________________________________________________
Mail submissions to [log in to unmask]
Administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc)
to [log in to unmask]
ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance:
http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html
Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at: [log in to unmask]
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