My name is Madeleine Shanks and I work as an Assistant Archivist Cataloguer at UAL. I recently finished cataloguing the Chelsea College of Arts Degree Show Slides collection, which is comprised of over 4,000 slides that document the work of graduating students from 1966 until 2000.
The slides are housed in the Old College Library at Chelsea and were digitised by the National Archives.
My role has been to catalogue the collection in full using international archival standards, ISAD(G). This will provide accessibility and searchability through the UAL Digital Special Collections site.
The Collection
At the beginning of the project, I was fairly overwhelmed by the scale of the collection. However, it provides a fascinating view of both changes and fundamentals of art pedagogy during a key 34-year period in recent art history.
Working so closely with a collection means you become incredibly familiar with the objects. What came to fascinate me as I progressed, was both what had changed and what had remained the same. For example, while students used new technologies over the years, some practices continued: life drawing and painting remains common throughout the collection.
There are other repeating motifs throughout the students work. The work shows exploration of abstraction through colour and form. There are also many depictions of animals (especially butterflies), domestic spaces, self-portraits and the studio appear again and again.
Another interesting thing I noticed is traditional sculpture practices seem to be less explored in later years than traditional painting practices. Students appeared to be using less stone and bronze throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, instead opting for more ephemeral and man-made materials.
During the project, I watched styles and practices come and go out of fashion, while others endured throughout.
The Cataloguing Process
The cataloguing process involves creating records for each item in the collection. It needs a very keen eye for detail. The aim is to capture as much information from the item as possible, in the correct structure for ISAD(G) standards.
When describing the work in the slide, I also wanted to keep in mind documenting detail that can be located using a free text search. With this, I hope that alumni may be able to locate their degree show work. In the future this may help to identify more of the creators, where this was not documented on the original slides.
A framework was created at the beginning of the project alongside my managers and colleagues regarding what information to capture, why to capture it and how?
We decided that having descriptions that were relatively uniform but also functioned as kind of “accessibility captions” in the same manner as ‘Alt-text’ for images, to just describe what you see when looking at the slide. For example:
‘35mm colour slide of degree show installation of sculpture constructed of twelve pyramid like peaks in a water like texture. Annotation on slide mount 'Jackson D. Post Dip 69-70'. Date stamp 'Jul 70'.’
I also used a descriptive field in the database called ‘term’ to make the records easy to locate and browse through based on different key words, such as ‘Sculpture’; ‘Art Education’; ‘Printing processes’
A usual day for me working on this project involved primarily looking carefully at the digitised slides and methodically inputting information into the archival software CALM. There was not much variety in this task: it is the kind of work that involves a lot of focus and concentration for an extended amount of time. However, it is also incredibly rewarding to review the progress made every day.
The Future
The cataloguing aspect of this project has finished, and the records are now in the process of being reviewed and published and will be available to browse through the Digital Collections site soon. I am hopeful that my work on the project will enable alumni to find their work and the work of their peers, and for current students and the public to explore a fascinating journey through contemporary art education. It can also contribute to future research around the history of art pedagogy.
Questions?
If you have any questions about accessing the Chelsea Degree Show Slides, please contact us at archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk.