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house of lantern slides



We have over 25,000 lantern slides in our collection.  Albert Bickmore, the
founder of the American Museum of Natural History, was an enthusiastic
proponent of lantern slide lectures in the late 19th century and many of the
Museum scientists used the slides for lectures. By the 1920's the Museum had
amassed a large collection of these images. The slides were loaned out as
sets with accompanying text on a regular basis to teachers and students
within the local area. There were many duplicate sets. Our present holdings
are a fraction of what once existed. Since the advent of 35mm slides (which
as part of our ongoing tradition of making educational material available to
the public we still provide at modest cost for lecture and research use) the
lantern slide collection dispersed.  It is not unusual for slides attributed
to the Museum to turn up at flea markets and yard sales.

In light of this, I have an unusual situation and am looking for your thoughts.

An artist's assistant called to inquire about the possibility of obtaining
lantern slides for use in her employer's next project, a sculpture--a full
size house made of original lantern slides.  He had purchased a collection
of some 15,000 slides at a flea market and contacted our institution because
a number of the slides were attributed to the AMNH.

I'm afraid this poor woman got quite an earful from me about preservation of
archival materials and objects vs. information.  My reaction was if the
artist MUST use "this discarded material" as raw material for his work he
should AT LEAST see about copying the slides so that the information might
be saved.  I know that there have been some rather playful comments on the
list in the past about the various uses of lantern slides; stained glass
window hangings, lampshades, etc. but on the whole I would appreciate some
reactions from the list.

And to answer some of your incipient queries about attempting to get the
marked materials back, my response is that I expect the collections were
given away or sold over the years.  It would be difficult and time consuming
to make attempts to repossess them and inevitably we would find many
duplicates among them.

Meanwhile, we are cleaning, arranging and entering data on the 25,000 plus
slides that remain in our collection. With the help of a small army of
volunteers and interns, we've re-housed and entered basic data for about 80%
of the collection over the last three years.  Unfortunately the accompanying
school lectures have yet to turn up.  Obversely, I've come across a
scientific lecture that refers to lantern slides but it's difficult to
identify the specific images.  The ideal for us, of course, would be to
reintegrate text and image as originally presented.

Grateful for any comments I might forward back to the artist.


Barbara Mathe
Senior Special Collections Librarian
Department of Library Services
American Museum of Natural History
79 Street and Central Park West
New York, NY 10024

PH. 212 769-5419
FAX 212 769-5009

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