Last fall, one of the Connelly Library’s MFA graduate assistants, Tim Goldsmith, began a fascinating research project in a little-known section of the Connelly Library’s collection. Below, he writes about what he discovered about the library's collection of folios.
I was tasked with investigating and researching information regarding the library’s collection of nearly 500 old plate folios, many from the 1800s and early 1900s. These folios are stacks of plates of images, photographs and engravings organized in a sequence around a particular subject and loosely bound in a sturdy cover; the Google image searches of their day.
Folios were a valuable visual reference tool, and today they offer a unique glimpse into systems of organization and documentation from nearly a century ago. Older folios contained black and white images, some with photographs and some with drawings and engravings. More recent folios were made in color, with a few of the folios in the collection containing original painted studies.
Institutions like museums often made use of folios as visual catalogs of their collections. Other folios cover more specific topics, like historic clothing and costumes from particular cultures, period furniture and architectural samples, to collections of work by specific artists. Many of the folios were published abroad, and the Connelly Library’s collection contains folios in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. The oldest folio in the collection, The Geometric Mosaics of the Middle Ages, was published in 1848.
The folio collection is available to use in the library as a resource for research. You can find more information about the folio collection through the Archives page of the library’s website. To access a folio, you can fill out an Archives request form and schedule an appointment to come in to the library and work with the folio.
Due to age, many of the folios are delicate and brittle, requiring great care in their handling. Like all archival material, they must stay in the library. The collection contains some really interesting images and information that we hope will be an inspiring and useful resource for the Moore community.
