DIGITAL ARCHIVIST

NY Times
January 12, 2017

“Mad Men,” an acclaimed show that explored a bygone era, will itself be grist for future cultural historians, thanks to a donation to the University of Texas at Austin.

Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, and Lionsgate, the producing studio, have given the show’s archive to the university’s Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum. The materials include script drafts and notes for all 92 episodes, costumes and props, as well as a collection of historical ads, magazines and other artifacts the producers used for reference and research.

“Mad Men,” an award-winning drama about angst and advertising in 1960s America, ran on AMC from 2007-2015. Though never a ratings hit, it was a critical favorite that influenced other shows as well as, with its sleek midcentury styling, the worlds of design and fashion.

“It’s our hope that the ‘Mad Men’ archive can satisfy academic curiosity and also provide creative inspiration,” Mr. Weiner said in a statement. “Both artists and scholars can retrace our steps and see how we became interested in the parts of the story we were interested in, and how the creation of the physical world as well as the characters and story lines in the show were the work of many talented people.”

The items and papers, which fill about 150 file boxes, will take roughly a year to catalog, said Steve Wilson, the Ransom Center’s film curator. Afterward, the materials will be available for study by scholars and the general public, and be the subject of future exhibitions. A few items will be on display in the center’s lobby until Feb. 1.

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The World’s Oldest Photography Collection Now Available Online

OpenCulture
January 3, 2017

Eastman’s legacy lives on in another important capacity as well: since the 40s, his Rochester, NY mansion housed one of the largest, the oldest, and perhaps the most impressive collections of photography in the world, the Eastman Museum. “In 1989,” the museum tells us, it “completed construction of a 73,000-square-foot building (more than 70 percent of which is below ground level) that included climate-controlled collection vaults, exhibition galleries, libraries, offices, and photographic conservation and film preservations labs.” And now, over a quarter of a million of the Eastman Museum’s holdings are available online in searchable galleries of “thousands of photographs that date back to the medium’s earliest years,” notes Claire Voon at Hyperallergic, “as well as “objects from its massive library of artifacts that together chronicle the history of image-making.”

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