a time consuming aspect of Parting with your Archive

Disposition of my archive and library has been an ongoing project for over a decade with recent activities having been spurred on by relocation to Melbourne in late 2023.

Recently I dispatched a set of ring binders containing photocopies of all of Jack Cato’s correspondence with Keast Burke to the wonderful Capon Research Library at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The letters were exchanged 1948–1956 while Jack was researching and writing his The Story of the Camera in Australia.  I wrote on the letters in Photofile in 1986.  see links below for that Story

The original letters are held at the National Library but they are not digitised and are not easy to find (link below). For that reason I had tried to lodge my copies with another library, thinking that it would increase access to the letters for a future researcher unable to travel to Canberra. Alas, not so, there was a lack of interest in them as they were copies — not the originals.

Before I sent my copies off to the Art Gallery, I scanned the letters and kept my Cato-Burke index cards in the optimistic plan to make an excel finding aid to assist researchers. A brave thought maybe!

 

I am now working on scanning my other research cards that are arranged  alphabetically by names and topics.  Above is a picture of one box of my cards.

Having such research cards was an essential part of my professional life in my days of being a curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and for a while once I joined the National Gallery in Canberra. Many colleagues of my vintage will remember how we relied on these card files.

Whereas researchers now would rely heavily on digital files and maybe only taking notes on paper if materials cannot be accessed with a laptop, camera or phone camera.

 

If my note taking and handwriting was a little tidier, I may have sent the cards with the letters to the Art Gallery but I decided they were not archive standard. So much of the information is now readily available on TROVE or internet searches.

and so, another part of my archive leaves the building!

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A note for future aspirations: In upcoming posts here on Parting with your Art, I ‘hope’ to publish reports and/or interviews with photographers or photographic archive managers about how they have/ are going to deal with their archives.

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A Story of The Story:  Correspondence between Jack Cato and Keast Burke (1986).

Link to National Library and the Cato letters see  ‘Class. Consignment added 2001’  ‘(File 32–38) — Box 6’

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click here for » contents page for Parting with Your Art

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