October 11, 1999
Surprise grant will make rare slides available to public
Since 1971, Slide Collections in the University Library has been the home of the archive of photographer Branson DeCou. But, because DeCou produced mainly lantern slides, the delicate and dated format of the slides (imprinted on glass and twice as big as modern 35 mm slides) made them impractical for general use.
Ironically, the DeCou slides are going from obsolete to cutting edge in one fell
swoop, thanks to a grant from a New York foundation.
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| A scene from Salerno, Italy (view larger image) Photo: Branson DeCou |
The $14,000 grant comes from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and will fund the purchase of a state-of-the-art slide scanner and the scanning, researching, and cataloguing of 1,000 of the 10,000 DeCou slides in the collection. The slides are ones that portray life in Italy, a special area of interest for the Delmas Foundation.
The grant helps put the University Library at the forefront of online cataloguing as well by supporting the transition from text-only catalog entries to text and visual entries.
"The whole point in getting this grant is to make these slides accessible," says arts bibliographer and slide librarian Christine Bunting, who worked on the grant proposal and will oversee the project. "Our goal is to put these up as an educational Web site and to link the pictorial representations to our slide records," she adds.
The news of the Delmas grant was somewhat unexpected. Although she had written a letter of inquiry, library development officer and librarian Margaret Gordon was expecting the result to be an invitation to apply for a grant. Instead, the foundation's response was a pledge of $14,000.
The Delmas Foundation supports humanities scholarship, performing arts in New York City, research library programs, and Venetian studies.
DeCou, a native of Philadelphia, had traveled the world by the time he was 20, documenting the life, industry, and culture of Europe and America in the 1910s to 1940s--a world that rapidly transformed in the aftermath of World War II. His black- -and white images captured vendors and artisans at work, architectural views, photographs of public monuments, sculptures, and frescoes. DeCou earned part of his living by presenting lecture tours at which he showed his beautiful hand-tinted slides to the accompaniment of music played on a Victrola.
Librarians are looking to October 2000 to have the work on the DeCou Italian collection available online. The images and corresponding catalog records will be included in SlideCat, the library's Web-based slide catalog, which is recognized as among the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the nation. The records will be made accessible via the California Digital Library, the Online Archive of California, and other significant specialized Web sites in art history and visual culture.
