Magical value of collections revisited
Isabelle Dussauge’s interesting comment to the earlier post on magical value of collections disappeared in some temporary spam comment box for a whole month — so we’ve reissued it below. Sorry for the fuzz, Isabelle!
27 Dec 2006 site admin
[Site administrator: Originally posted November 28th, 2006 at 11:16 am]
Hi all,
Aspects of these discussions are hot, as Kajsa Hartig’s good presentation brought up last week at the Nordic visual studies conference A Closer Look. The issue - in part similar to what you discuss here - was how photographic collections should be acquired, administered and made available by e.g. museums: is it enough to have photographs digitized and accessible through a database? or should original prints/reprints be documented, kept, administrated, made available? what about negatives? for whom? how whould digitized versions be documented? what are researchers needs, and other interested professional groups’?
The discussions about the way museums, archives and library should work with photographs made highly visible the different uses and “values” of this material: some of the researchers argued that they would not have needed access to the artifactual photographs and negatives for the projects they were conducting, whereas others obviously have needed and used this artifactual dimension of their visual material.
There is certainly a magical value to material documents and pictures, but their artifactuality is also part of the ‘meaningful’ content of the sources for certain historians or projects.
To me, this points to the most difficult part of the issue: these different kinds of value are highly dependent on the possible uses of documents, pictures etc - and this use is pretty much dependent on who uses them.
On the other hand, the problem of ‘designing in’ uses in the creation of sources echoes with those encountered in other historical enterprises such as gathering/creating sources in contemporary history; and we know that some of these issues are if not solved, at least coped with.
Or is the parallel far-stretched?
//Isabelle.