Visual Research in Creative Collections & Economies

This Summary outlines the benefits to the environment and capacities for research activities which would follow on from the upgrading and replacement of four pieces of essential equipment which will be used by the non-traditional creative archives and collections of the University of Dundee (UoD). This initiative has stimulated a cross University partnership including Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD), the School of Humanities (SoH) and Archives & Museums Services (A&MS). The group have strengths in the areas of time-based art and comics with a strong track record of important research in these areas.

The research areas supported by our collections are moving towards a much closer alignment through a strategic move to consolidate research and resources across the University in an interdisciplinary Creative Economies and Practice Based Research initiative. The REWIND media preservation lab and archive, the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS) and related archive are key to this initiative but also includes: Demarco Digital Archive; Attic Archive of Peter Haining; Artist's Book Collection; and the recently acquired MacLennan Archive amongst others.

These collections need careful management to ensure that they remain accessible for research purposes. In particular, digitisation is urgently required to ensure preservation of physically and technologically fragile material and to facilitate access and impact. Upgrading of key pieces of equipment is urgently required to ensure research continues and to strengthen this Creative Economies and Practice Research initiative. The preservation of these important archive and media collections is essential to UoD's research in visual arts and culture-related archives and curation. This is a continually growing area of research and UoD is at the cutting edge of innovation in the field. Further investment will sustain this momentum. Interdisciplinarity and knowledge exchange is a key feature of activities in this area - working with galleries, publishers, artists, community groups etc. and through this developing new techniques for preservation and restoration. The overall pressing need is to facilitate the consolidation of visual research and creative economies initiatives currently being undertaken by DJCAD and SoH in conjunction with A&MS.

The equipment we urgently require in order to meet our research ambitions are four in number. The first is a replacement moving image film scanner to allow the highest quality archive standard image resolution and sound to be digitised. Secondly, we require a replacement computer for restoration of film video and audio to allow faster processing of media and to use new AI methods of restoration which are very processor heavy. We also need a Umatic tape cleaning machine to replace the current manual process, which will dramatically reduce processing and restoration time. Lastly, we urgently need to replace our broken overhead camera system and related software with a new large-format overhead book scanner for digitising bound volumes and large flat documents and artworks.

The key aim of the Creative Economies and Practice Based Research initiative is the creation of virtual spaces for our partners and the public to engage with our rich resources in Archives and Collections in the field of visual culture and the arts. The groundwork for this is being laid now, but access to these archives and collections for creative economies partners has been limited due to our outdated digitisation equipment and restrictions on access have been exacerbated during lockdown. The upgrade of equipment would maximize our capacity to make available digitised assets to a wider audience and in turn, enable a longer-term strategy to support the creative economies through impactful partnership-based research projects and public engagement activities such as online exhibitions, film screenings, virtual tours and talks.