A Box of Slides

If the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” holds true, then the Museum possesses a few million words as stored objects. Since the tenure of the Museum’s original director and humble naturalist Lois Nestel, a few thousand photographic color slides have accumulated here like family photos stuffed inside of a shoe box. While some slides have been used throughout the years as educational tools, others have remained as nostalgic reminders of local places and familiar faces. Today, most of the slides are housed in archival storage boxes still awaiting formal accession into Museum records. This store of 35 mm imagery tells volumes about the Museum’s history and expresses the wonders of natural history in a manner unlike that of other museum specimens. 

Imagine the ability to see through the eyes of Lois Nestel as she expertly searched the Cable area one spring for flowering plants. Because of the Museum’s store of slides, this is possible. Accompanied by a script written by Lois, a collection of some 38 botanical scenes remain ready in a projector carousel for Lois’s spring wildflower program. Just one slide could capture an entire moment for Lois to share with her audience as she described each plant’s attributes. Luckily for her viewers, flowers could be witnessed as they occur in their environment, stems reaching up towards the sunshine. Although the flowers pictured have long returned to the soil, their image remains on a 35 mm slide to be shared again with Museum visitors to come.

For a natural history museum, the ability to share visuals is one of many valuable instruments for conveying the wonders of the natural world.  Photographs are utilized from supplementing a talk to opening a window into an experience. Admittedly, some yet hold little value for educational programming. They do, however, store memories of the Museum’s place within our community. Slides span back to Lois Nestel’s tenure as Director from 1967 to her retirement in 1988, and more were generated until fairly recently. One can flip back through slide pages to see the construction of the Jackson Burke House, staff working on large desktop computer monitors of the old facility, components of past exhibits, and some of the many programs led by the Museum’s naturalists. There has been a reason for keeping all of these images,  and something about holding an old photographic slide once owned by the Museum’s first director feels significantly sentimental.

Thinking to the future, the Museum intends to document each slide in our records. Images will be described, inevitably sparking memories and leading to stories shared around the office. While the physical slides shall be carefully stored for their value as a nearly extinct format, preservation efforts further include copies in a modern format. Beginning with Lois Nestel’s spring wildflower photos, the move to digitize the slides is already underway as a means to safeguard the information kept within impermanent objects.