Arranging, Describing and Preserving Photographic Slides

This post was contributed by Meaghan Lanier, Library Associate, Special Collections Research Center.

My coworker, Sarah Breen, and I recently finished arranging and describing the Mitchell Bush Papers (MC 00467). Sarah posted a brief description of the collection on December 2 (http://news.lib.ncsu.edu/scrc/ ), soon after we published the collection guide on the web (/findingaids/mc00467 )

Dr. Mitchell Bush is a leader in the field of modern zoological medicine focused on pioneering studies and clinical practice in zoological and comparative medicine. His collection is a large one (105 boxes occupying 55.25 linear feet of shelf space), and there are many slides included, some of them accompanied by lecture notes. Many of these slides were used in Bush’s pathology as well as to show a record of his procedures and how they were performed. Now slides are being replaced with digital files, but the work of the past still matters for the present and the future, so these slides need to be preserved for future students of zoology and related fields.

When the collection arrived at NCSU, there were about 35 binders filled with slides and some additional slides in individual sheets and boxes. As you can see in the picture below, many of the binders were old, dusty and falling apart.

Inside the binders the slides were sheets with pockets holding slides. Many of the sheets were sticky and cloudy.

In order to preserve the slides, we needed to remove them from these sheets and these binders. With cotton gloves on my hands, I removed the slides, one by one, keeping them in order and facing the correct way. I placed them in slide boxes with tabs separating the slides that came from each binder. Everywhere that slides or groups of slides could be identified they were separated with a tab. These slide boxes as well as the tabs are made with archival material, which means they will not cause the slides to deteriorate, especially when they are also housed in a climate controlled environment, such as the NCSU Libraries’ Satellite Shelving Facility.

Below you can see that six slide boxes fit into a flat box.

In the end, the slides occupied seven flat boxes, each with six slide boxes in it. I estimated that there are now 6,000 slides rehoused, safely stored and available to researchers interested in zoological medicine.