Title and statement of responsibility area
Title proper
Numbered contact sheets, negatives and prints
General material designation
- Photographic materials
- Records in electronic form (digitized)
Parallel title
Other title information
Title statements of responsibility
Title notes
Level of description
Sub-series
Reference code
Edition area
Edition statement
Edition statement of responsibility
Class of material specific details area
Statement of scale (cartographic)
Statement of projection (cartographic)
Statement of coordinates (cartographic)
Statement of scale (architectural)
Issuing jurisdiction and denomination (philatelic)
Dates of creation area
Date(s)
-
1963-2001 (Creation)
Physical description area
Physical description
Analog originals:
ca. 255,000 negatives
ca. 8500 contact sheets
ca. 1800 prints
Digitized copies:
ca. 270 GB of photographs: tiff (preservation copies), pdf, jpg (access copies)
Publisher's series area
Title proper of publisher's series
Parallel titles of publisher's series
Other title information of publisher's series
Statement of responsibility relating to publisher's series
Numbering within publisher's series
Note on publisher's series
Archival description area
Name of creator
Custodial history
Scope and content
Sub-series consists of photographic negatives, contact sheets and prints created by staff photographers of LIDC and its predecessors. Contact sheets are pages of thumbnail images developed from the negatives. Contact sheets were organized by the creators by year, assigning a unique year-based serial number to each sheet (e.g. IMC 72062 = contact sheet 62 from 1972 created by the Instructional Media Centre). It is the contact sheets (rather than individual images) that were indexed (see note below on Finding aids).
For a few years (1987-1989), prints were developed from the negatives and filed by the same contact-sheet number system. Not all contact sheet negatives in these years were developed into prints; and the number of the prints post-1989 is very small. In the file-level contact sheet descriptions, the Physical storage section indicates the availability and container number of the contact sheet and any associated negatives and prints. In a small number of cases, contact sheets or negative may be missing, meaning they were not transferred to the Archives.
For photo subjects, see the parent series description for F-18-1, Photographic materials.
Note that the 1963 negatives pre-date the construction of the university and were later incorporated by IMC into its photo system. There are no contact sheets for the 1963 images.
Notes area
Physical condition
Immediate source of acquisition
Arrangement
In the Archives' initial arrangement of this material (as F-18-1-1), contact sheets and negatives were physically housed in file folders based on the number of items that could reasonably fit in a folder. There was a separate run of files for contact sheets and negatives, and file numbers were assigned sequentially.
In 2018-2020, the Archives physically rehoused the materials, removing them from file folders to flat storage. Contact sheets and negatives are still stored separately, but the creator's original year-based reference codes apply to both and are used to correlate and locate materials. In 2022, the old sub-series (F-18-1-1) was retired. The current arrangement more closely follows the original organization by contact sheet number. It creates a sub-sub-series for each year and within those groupings, a file for each contact sheet. As individual photographs are scanned from the original negatives, these are uploaded as items of the contact sheet.
Language of material
- English
Script of material
Location of originals
Availability of other formats
The Archives is digitizing and uploading the contact sheets (1965-1972 completed as of October 2022). Contact sheets are sometimes annotated on the back, and the sheets have been digitized front and back as separate tiff files (preservation copy), along with a combined pdf (access copy). For access to the tiffs, consult the reference archivist.
The Archives can provide high-quality scans from the original negatives. Contact the reference archivist and indicate the contact sheet and frame number of the image(s) requested. Scanning resolutions depend on the size of the original negative but are calculated so as to produce an image with 4000 pixels on the longest side. The access copies in SFU AtoM are jpgs, but the higher-quality tiff preservation copies are available on request. Note that when providing copies to researchers, the Archives does not attempt to retouch or crop images, leaving this to the researchers; the images uploaded to AtoM are as-provided to researchers. The Archives is in the process of uploading previously scanned images to SFU AtoM.
Restrictions on access
The photographs are open with no restrictions.
Terms governing use, reproduction, and publication
Copyright in the bulk of these records belongs to SFU (materials made in the course of employment). The Archives provides access to these materials under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC). There may be some exceptions where photos included in the sub-series were created by non-SFU third parties; these will be noted in file-level descriptions where applicable.
Finding aids
In 1984 the Archives worked with SFU's Computing Centre to create an automated photo index on the university's mainframe computing service. Archives staff input descriptive data found on the back of contact sheets into the centralized database, the scope of which encompassed the photos covered by this series, as well as photos created by Media and Public Relations (F-61-1) and The Peak (F-17-1). Post-1984, photographers had access to the database to index their own contact sheets. Around 1990, the database was discontinued and the data exported to a standalone FileMaker database transferred to Archives. Photographers, however, also received similar FileMaker databases and continued their own indexing. This data was also eventually transferred to Archives along with the sheets and negatives.
Around 2012, the Archives consolidated all this legacy descriptive data into its internal Archives Information System (AIS) database to facilitate searches for reference inquiries. The data, however, was only accessible in the Archives' reading room. In the fall of 2022 the Archives migrated the index into SFU AtoM, mapping the legacy data over to the Scope and content note at the file level for individual contact sheets. No attempt has been made to massage the data into narrative descriptions. The index did not always use consistent subject terms, some terms may be dated, and spelling errors may occur.
Uploaded finding aid
Associated materials
There are two other fonds with university-related photographs similarly organized as contact sheets and negatives: University Communications and Marketing > Series F-61-1-4 and The Peak > Series F-17-1-1.
Accruals
No future accruals are expected.
Alternative identifier(s)
Standard number area
Standard number
Access points
Subject access points
Place access points
Name access points
Genre access points
Control area
Description record identifier
Institution identifier
Rules or conventions
Status
Final
Level of detail
Full
Dates of creation, revision and deletion
January 2023: series established and described; replaces retired sub-series F-18-1-1.
Language of description
- English