Three Ring Binders for Slides

Three-ring binders can be so helpful in organizing things that they even make three-ring binders with pockets for slides and photographs. Have you ever tried to organize slides with three-ring binders? There are several pros and cons to doing so.

First the pros...

• There are many labeling options. You can label an entire page as well as each slide. Labeling can be done on the slide or on the pockets or both. You can insert scraps of paper with additional metadata in one of the pockets (instead of a slide). You can also add pieces of paper in the binder with additional explanation, e.g. an explanation of abbreviations used on the slides, organization information, numbering techniques, general information about the entire collection, etc.
• The sheets are easy to remove as a whole sheet and clear pockets allow for viewing several slides at once by holding up to a light or putting against a light table.
• If the slides have a specific order (e.g. a presentation), is easier to keep them properly arranged since you are only ordering several pages, instead of tens or hundreds of slides.
  
• It is easier to compare duplicates or similar slides if you can hold about 20 of them at once.
• It can be easy to expand a slide collection located in a binder since you would just need to add an additional page.
  
• These type of slide covers keep most dust and bugs off of the image.
• As long as the slides are kept out of high humidity, they are relatively safe from mold in these slide pockets.
• As long as you pay attention to the type of material the slide pockets are made out of, it is a recommended preservation options by Wilhelm Imaging Research
  

And the cons...

• Like any physical holder, you must make a determination of how you will handle placement. Putting only slides from one designation on a page may be helpful (e.g. from one event, of one person, of one botanical species, etc.).
• Binders can take a lot of room. If you are placing only slides from one event/person/place, etc. on a page, you may have many pages that are not full. This adds to the bulk of a collection that could be very efficiently stored (but not as easily accessed) in boxes or some other fashion.
• Binders can still make expansion difficult. Sometimes it is unreasonable to put one type of slide on a page, e.g. when there are typically less than 10 of one type or quite often only 2-3 of one type. In this case, it is necessary to combine types on pages. If new slides need to fit between these types, it might be time consuming to fit them in. It also limits the amount of permanent writing you would be able to do on the slide pockets -- as slides may be moving to different pockets over the course of time.
  
• Binders tend to get top heavy. Because those putting together the collection is most likely to start storing slides at the upper-left-most part of the page, the right side and bottom of each slide pocket sheet may not be filled. After 50-100 pages, there is a noticeable bulge at the top of the binder -- much like a stack of stapled packets.
• The slide pockets can also be clingy and static-y. Information marked with pencil may rub off the slide and onto the pocket. Depending on where the markings were, the pencil marks could dirty up the entire pocket making it hard to see the slides through. It can also cause difficulty in reading information on the slide -- as not only the slide will be smudged, but the additional graphite will obscure even new slides with permanent writing.
• Some of these three-hole slide pockets aren't as clear and easy to see through as others. And some don't wear as well as others. It's worth investigating some options before investing in this type of organization for your collection.

Minimizing the cons...

• You can minimize most of the cons with careful planning, especially in how you will label images. Keeping most of the labeling on each slide is always helpful to allow moving the slides to different pockets or pages, and guard against losing slides that may be taken out of the binder during use.
• If you have an expanding collection, planning carefully the spacing between current slides in the collection and how additional slides will be added can avoid headaches later. Both keeping space on each page of slide pockets and space in each binder for additional pages can help.
  
• Another option to minimize the headaches of an expanding collection is using cross reference stickers to direct users to separate binders with later additions to the collection.
  
• Using smaller binders (e.g. 1 to 1.5 inch binders instead of 4 or 6 inch binders) can minimize the problem of top heavy binders. While it may mean more binders, they are easier to handle. If they are labeled well, they will be easy to organize. In addition, in a heavily used collection, more people will be able to simultaneously use different parts of the collection than if all the slides were in only one or two binders.
  

How have you organized slides or seen them organized? What are some issues you've seen with slides in binders or how have you minimized some of these problems?

Abbreviations in Metadata

Acronyms and abbreviations are very helpful especially in the case of having metadata on small object such as slides. While you can have a catalog pointing to the object's location, the slide itself still needs to be labeled so that it can be organized. Slides have a limited amount of space on them, and while you can attach papers to them, or put papers next to them in a slide binder or box, eventually the paper and slide will get separated. For a slide to be viewed it must be able to stand alone.

It is, therefore, important to have certain basic information on the slide itself. The most obvious information is what's in the picture. However, even if the picture is self-explanatory, -- e.g. taken in a zoo, with the zebra sign in the foreground and a zebra in the background -- it's only labeled as to what it is, not its context within the collection. For example, without a categorization number or some sort of accession number, how would we differentiate it from other zebra images? How would we shelve it or organize it? And how would we find it again, in a book or box of other slides?

Besides having some basic information of what is in the picture, an accession number and a classification designation will also be needed. If the slide as been added to a digital database, it probably has an additional reference number for that. Some slides may also have a year and a photographer and a location note. All very helpful in case a database, catalog, or other metadata tool is lost, outdated or corrupted.

Think about what this slide might now look like. Let's take an example slide of a flower. Numbers 8983, 1990, and 02-2156 appear on the slide. Letter-type writing included: Lily F., Aletris lutea, L12, and FL. On the back was a stamp of a photographer. Confused? I was too. In fact, I had seen a slide similar to this and assumed the Lily F. refered to a photographer -- which unfortunately was different than the photographer mentioned on the back. Not until looking at several similar slides and then seeing one labeled Rose F. in the same way, did I realize that the F. stood for "family" (as in belonging to the Lily Family and the Rose Family) not a last name. Most of the slides in this collection had the scientific names Liliaceae and Rosaceae. This deviation was confusing. It made me think twice about the types of abbreviations on slides and their consistency.

While just having all the relevant information on the slide is helpful, it is not always enough. The best scenario would be to label each piece of metadata, e.g. accession: xxxx, photographer: xxx, year: xxx, location: xxx, etc. On a slide, with little space, however, that is not feasible. Sometimes it's a challenge to fit the scientific name alone!

Tips to cut the confusion

• A consistent location on the slide can be helpful. If the accession number is always in the bottom left, it will be easier to identify. The family name can always appear on the left side. And so on.
  
• Abbreviations can help. If the accession number always begins with an A, or the year always begins with a Y, it might make it clearer what each piece of information is.
• Formatting can also be a clue. The 2-digit-hyphen-4-digit accession number, if always formatted that way, can be a clue. Consciously selecting special formats for different information types can be a helpful clue.
  
• Finally, having a table to cross reference abbreviations is also necessary. BBNP is a much more helpful location note than TX because it designates Big Bend National Park -- which gives a specific part of TX, a specific city, and perhaps almost geographic coordinates. It's not as obvious as TX = Texas, however, and without a cross reference, may be less helpful in the long run if it can never be decoded.

Metadata is important in preservation, because if there is no information about when, where, or what the image is of, it is almost as if we were unable to preserve the image in the first place.

If we are...

• unable to organize it and give it a place in the collection
• unable to talk about it in relation to the work it was intended for (e.g. botanical images intended for botanical research)
• unable talk about how old it is, who made it, where it was made, or put it into a historical context
  

...then we have not been stewards of the item. We cannot provide adequate access to it. And we have not preserved it.


Have you had to do a bit of decoding in your work to determine what something is, how old it is, or other information about it? Were you able to discover the "answer" you were looking for? What additional tools may have been helpful in your quest?