Month: September 2011

Time seems to fly by so fast! The students have come back this week and there is a real buzz to the Faculty again. Despite some of the building works here in the basement of Grand Parade still continuing, our new archival store is ready and in use – the rolling shelves have been installed and are once again filled with materials!

The Design Archives team have made a decision about the best way to store the large format posters I have mentioned in earlier posts. We are waiting to hear back from a suppliers in France about the new storage unit. In this, we are looking to place not only the largest format ICOGRADA materials but also the parts of this collection currently stored horizontally in plan-chests in the main area of the Archives. The arrival of the unit will also give us some room to re-organise the Archives’ ‘main space’ in which our ever-increasing team and researchers work in – with some strategic shuffling, we are hopeful that we may even have the space to accommodate more than two researchers at a time.

Other news that I have been excited about this month is that we have purchased a roll of Archibond archival heat-set tissue and a tacking iron for the Archives. Once the storage unit and large Melinex sleeves for the posters arrive, I can begin the task of surface cleaning and repairing the more damaged poster materials. It will make the most sense to do this work before the posters get placed in the Melinex sleeves, which will be a task in itself due to their size and the way in which Melinex works by holding objects placed within it by static, preventing slippage – Melinex is an uncoated polyethylene terephthalate polyester known for its strength and chemical stability and is widely used by archives and museums. Once the posters have been re-housed, we are hopeful that there won’t be a need to come out of the protective sleeve. This will not only prolong their life but will also make them easier to handle with less stress placed on the paper itself when moving. The conservation work is, however, entirely dependant on a researcher-free day in the Archives as it will require a large table surface for me to work on. And now that we have the supplies on the premises, minor repair projects on areas of the other collections will also become possible if needed.

The Max Gill exhibition at the University Gallery has now finished. It is a somewhat sad feeling seeing all the artworks wrapped up and the walls of the gallery empty (if only for a few moments). From reading the comments book in the Gallery, it appears that the public very much enjoyed the experience of the exhibition too. Here’s hoping the works will get a new lease of life at another venue as soon as possible! The MacDonald Gill digital resource created to compliment the exhibition has now been officially published. As an extra part of the resource, I have created a section within it inviting you, the ‘general public’, to share your stories and experiences with the works of Max Gill and becoming a ‘living’ part of the resource. Should you wish to contribute, there is a simple form for you to fill within the resource.

The building works here at the Design Archives are moving swiftly on despite a few hiccups along the way. We are now at day 20 of the move and during this time the collections within our ‘old’ storage area have been carefully packed by the movers and are stored temporarily elsewhere in the building. We are currently at a stage where almost all of the major building works have been finished and the removal and reassembling of the rolling shelves is taking place. The builders have done a great job in re-inventing our new storage area and the Link51 archival shelving team have, for the past two days, been busy taking down the rolling shelving from the old storage area and moving it to the new space, bit by bit. Once this has been completed, all of the shelving surfaces will need to be thoroughly cleaned before the collections get put back in. We are hopeful that the move will be finished on schedule before the new term starts.

While all of this has been going on, myself and Suzy Horada have been making the most of the students’ summer holidays and have spent considerable time in the photographic studio continuing the digitisation of the ICOGRADA poster collection as mentioned in my last blog post. To date, we have managed to digitise around 200 posters in total. This is a great asset added to our internal database and eventually another great addition for our area on the Archives Hub. We are going to continue this major digitisation effort at least well into next week, which also sees colleagues returning from maternity leave and longer holidays – The Design Archives will be operating a full house again.