At the Stationer's New
Members Evening late last year, I finally met my mentor for the first time.
Sarah Mahurter, is the current Manager of University Archives & Special
Collections Centre (ASCC) at University Arts London (UAL) and she invited me on a tour
of her workplace.
It was interesting to
learn that the Centre were created around 2007 with the Stanley Kubrick
Archives as one focal point of the collections. As a mainly film and design archives and
special collections, the layout of centre is a futuristic glass reading room and office space with red chairs, modelled after a clip in the movie Odyssey. The centre does not hold any university records (as they are located elsewhere) but the
collections are embedded into the university courses curriculum. Furthermore, half of all users
are students and the other half are external users such as film historians and
actual film companies which is an exciting prospect.
In my opinion, the major strength of these
collections is that they truly support academic teaching and foster learning
development, as the student has physical resources to use as reference. The academic
staff and library staff also understand the need for these resources and support
their use. However, one downside is that there is usually only one copy of each
resource and if damaged the chances of it being replaced is slim. Conversely,
this explains the importance of the collections and why trained archivists work with the collections and supervise their use.
