Funsters at the Venice Biennale: Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts

The Funsters 

Venice Biennale: lover of all the art forms

Fellini shelf in the Venice Biennale's Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts

The Venice Biennale's Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts collection closely mirrors the history and development of the Biennale itself. Founded in 1895, until 1930 the Biennale was Fine Arts specific, and so is the Library collection. In 1930, the Biennale event became independent from the local Venetian Government, and became dependant on the National Fascist government. After various allegiances, the Biennale became privatised and independent in 1998. 

In a surprisingly un-fascist turn of events, it was during the 1930s that many of the satellite events were added to the agenda and today the Biennale comprises several distinct festivals in Art, Architecture, Cinema, Dance, Music, and Theatre. The Library and Archives reflect this diverse and behemoth brief. 

Kunsthochschulbibliothek: Film classics

A great series of true film classics, whose rainbow colours I came across last year at the Kunst Universitat Linz Library in Upper Austria, overlooking the Danube. I will post about that soon! My Art Library Crawl backlog is keeping me up at nights...

Art Center College of Design: ACCD DVD

The ACCD DVD collection is hefty, weighing in with approximately 10,000 titles.
The library also provides acces to a number of film streaming services. These services seem to be much more common in American libraries that in those back in Oz. I'm sure we will get there.

Physical film resources have subject division displayed via coloured spines.
Feature films sport this hot pink.































These instructional Gnomen DVDs are extremely popular resources.ACCD also provides access to an online subscription service of short format software training vids via lynda.com.
Turns out Lynda (of the .com) is a graduate and former ACCD faculty member who developed the project/business with her illustrator husband (also an Art Centre graduate).
lynda.com is currently engaged with creativity on a more conceptual scale, with interviews and documentaries on creatives and their process, a series on colour theory, and other art, design and composition streams.

Workhorse videocassettes sporting white spines 

Other film subject categories include the documentary collection, films about art or artists, animation, history and science, music videos, advertising, television, experimental video art and guest lectures.

Read more about the James Lemont Fogg Library's film collections here.