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collection offer



[cross-posted to ARCHIVES and PHOTOHST, so apologies in
advance]

I recently received a letter from someone offering us a collection as
follows:

"From 1966-1993 my parents traveled the world, taking 300,000+
slides, which they narrowed own to 25,386, and organized into 66
slide shows with narration and music.  My mother, who lives in
Napa Valley, is now preparing to move into a nursing home, and we
need to find a new home for 266 carousels, 133 tapes, [and] 893
pages of script.  [snip]  I have an index of the contents of the 66
shows."

I wrote to the email address given in the letter and learned the
following in reply:

"The other slides were tossed as they created the shows...actually
275,000 is an estimate (thank goodness I didn't have to count
them!). They were ruthless in their selection of slides to keep.

I was searching the web for places that might be interested in the
slides. The Univ. of Utah was one of the places, as was UC
Riverside and the Carpenter center at Harvard.  We are a pretty
ecumenical family, with no direct link, other than a cousin, to the
Mormons.

It hadn't occurred to me that we might actually sell the collection.  I
was thinking of it as a tax-write-off for my mother.  If donated, I
would want the University to have the collection packed up and
shipped off so that we don't have to incur either the work or the
cost."

After thinking and talking it over with my staff, I can't really justify
the time and money and resources that giving this collection the
treatment it deserves would entail, given that it doesn't fit in any
way into our collection development policies.  It sounds like a very
neat bunch of stuff and in the best of all possible worlds I'd love to
have it; but given the current funding climate with the University of
Utah and the Utah Legislature (if the football team would only throw
that BYU game a couple of years in a row!), I think I have to say no
to this.

So here's the question, after this long-winded entry: is there
anyone out there in Archivy who would be interested in this?  Are
there "around-the-world" repositories?  We actually have a couple
of collections like this; but 80 magic lantern slides or a couple
dozen 16mm films are one thing; 25,000+ slides are quite another.

So if you are interested, do this: contact me, and I'll forward your
messages to the donor, and you and she can take it from there.


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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