[Personal_archives] Description question

[Jane Britton]

Last year a local photographer donated his negatives to our repository and in the course of  writing a fonds description it occurred to me that there was no direction in RAD or in the literature that I could find on how to treat the fonds of an individual who is also a business. Looking at other photographer's studio fonds listed in CAIN it's apparent that most are described under the business or studio name (many of these also have a succession of photographers), a decision that makes intuitive sense but one that I have begun to question.

In the case of photographers, it is usually only their oeuvre, if you will, that ends up in an archive, so although photographs are created by the individual, it is the individual wearing a business hat, so the business name is used as the creator, say for example "Black Tie Studio fonds". ( Although I would like to think, for argument's sake, that the person's name would be an equally valid choice.)

In this particular case I have reason to think that the photographer will also donate his personal photographs to us. In that case he as an individual would be the creator and the fonds would be "Joe Black fonds". So my dilemma is, do I then have one fonds or two fonds? Or one fonds with two series, Personal and Studio photographs? Or what?

If anyone has dealt with this situation before or has any thoughts I would be grateful for some input.

Regards and thanks.

Jane Britton
Archivist, Special Collections
University of Waterloo Library
200 University Ave. W. Waterloo ON N2L 3G1
(519) 888-4567 x32445  FAX: (519) 888-4322

[Wordmark_Web_or_Email_uWaterloo]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20101203/6eb8c061/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 5440 bytes
Desc: image001.jpg
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/personal_archives/attachments/20101203/6eb8c061/attachment.jpg