Lawes, Elizabeth;
(2024)
‘Counting fry under a waterfall’: the history, development, and current use of the Small Press Collections at University College London.
Textual Practice
10.1080/0950236x.2024.2360844.
(In press).
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Abstract
University College London Special Collections holds the Small Press Collections consisting of the Little Magazines, Alternative Presses, and Poetry Store of poetry pamphlets, artist’s books, and other text bearing print objects. This essay outlines the history and growth of the collections, founded by Geoffrey Soar in 1964, and starts by exploring the networks essential to the development of a large collection of international, independently published literary and visual art material. I draw on fifteen years’ experience as Collection Manager to examine the challenges of acquiring, cataloguing, and managing non-mainstream, self-published, ephemeral material in an institutional context and facilitating access for researchers. It considers selected comparable collections in the UK and the US and the difficulties in aligning institutional holdings and practices. The notions of materiality and obsolescence in the context of library collections are considered in relation to mimeographed and other format little magazines and small press publications. It concludes with examples of object-based learning scenarios that reactivate the material in a teaching and research context.
Type: | Article |
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Title: | ‘Counting fry under a waterfall’: the history, development, and current use of the Small Press Collections at University College London |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.1080/0950236x.2024.2360844 |
Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2024.2360844 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | Special collections; little magazines; small press; object-based learning; materiality; obsolescence |
UCL classification: | UCL |
URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10195141 |
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