From Art History Pedagogic Resource to Post-Digital Art Medium: Shifting Cultural Values in a Dismantled Slide Library

35mm slide libraries used to support art history teaching in higher education in UK and North America have been widely dismantled and dispersed over the last decade. This article examines the cultural values that have been illuminated by debates about their decline and disposal, and the contexts and practices for their afterlife. Drawing on sector-wide debates, interviews with former slide librarians and surviving slide library material, the article pays special attention to one large-scale case study, formerly held at the University of Brighton, UK. The article traces the slide library’s establishment and demise, examines the cultural labour of its production and maintenance, and evaluates the collection’s particularities and idiosyncrasies. Through this, it outlines the values and meanings that were established and contested during the collection’s working life and its 2011 dismantling, and it considers how these have been subsequently repositioned in the intervening decade. The slide collection’s devaluation, at the point of its deaccession, contrasts sharply with slides' recent revaluation in three locations: scholarly interests in photographic materialities and media archaeologies, the retro marketplace and especially contemporary art practice. These recent shifts and frameworks provide fresh perspectives on dismantled slide collections and their rescued remains.