SFU Library acquires Videomatica documentaries

Librarian Penny Swanson with
Videomatica documentaries

On October 31, 2011 Vancouver’s great 4th Avenue video store, Videomatica, closed its doors for good. But for SFU, it was a new beginning. Associate University Librarian (AUL), Collections, Todd Mundle, along with several staff, spent a rainy Saturday in November at Videomatica boxing up thousands of movies for the Library’s media collection.

“We got the documentaries and UBC got the rest of the collection,” says Mundle. “Because of the subject content, it will have as good an application within an academic environment as a collection of feature films. We already have a lot of documentaries, so this enhances what we’ve already collected.”

Library staff now have the job of matching the DVD disks and VHS tapes to their cases, which were kept separately and displayed empty on store shelves often in some disorder. In all, about 2,300 DVDs and 500 VHS films were acquired. Sorting and cataloguing is expected to last through most of 2012 with the collection becoming available for borrowing in early 2013.

As he was boxing them up, Mundle kept thinking to himself, hey I wanted to see that. “Kings of Pastry caught my eye, for example. It’s an intense and exhilarating film about four guys going for their pastry chef certification in France. The titles are all over the map,” says Mundle.

The owners of Videomatica originally had approached the Vancouver Public Library and asked them to take over the collection, but it was so large, the public library could not afford it nor did it fully fit their mandate. So then UBC and SFU were approached. “From a cost perspective we could not afford the whole thing,” says Mundle. Library Dean Chuck Eckman and former AUL for Collections Gwen Bird conducted the negotiations with UBC and the Videomatica owners. Eckman says, “We could not think of a clear way to make this a shared acquisition until [SFU Contemporary Arts filmmaker] Colin Browne mentioned that our film program focused on documentaries. At that moment we knew this component of the collection would be most appropriate to SFU’s interests.” The documentaries took up approximately 10% of the collection.

Asked how she felt about UBC getting the lion’s share, Cataloguing division head Penny Swanson said, “The feature films will all eventually be online, but the documentaries, because of their very small distributions, may never be online. And we’ve got them!”