About the Collection

History

After Baly's death in 1987, his widow Louise gifted the collection to the college along with the written materials about it. At Kenyon, it likely was first taken in by the Political Science Department. After this, we have next to no records. We presume that it was handed off to several different departments, before it found a permanent home in the Visual Resources Center, which at that time was functioning as a slide library for all of Kenyon, and had the facilities and expertise to care for it.

The collection functioned like this for some time. When a professor wanted to show an image in class, they contacted the VRC and someone there would locate the slides for them to borrow. In the academic year 2014-15, Shariq Khan '15 (identified by -SK in descriptions), Jenna Nolt, the Digital Initiatives Librarian at Kenyon, and Eugene Dwyer, Professor of Art History, worked together to digitize the collection on the Digital Kenyon platform. This work, contemporaneous with Shariq's Independent Study with Dwyer on Islamic Architecture, focused heavily on the mosques and holy sites Baly captured in Turkey, Iran, and Palestine, and is the reason for the Islamic skew the researched subset of the collection currently exhibits.

Sources

Much of the information about the collection is partially or entirely missing. We have external records of a few of Baly's trips, but almost everything we know is reconstructed off of what he left in the collection. The information we have is almost entirely from two sources: the physical slides and the slide index pages.

On each slide, there is typically some amount of information about the image written on the cardboard slide mount. This most often includes the 'written date' marking the date it was taken, to a varying degree of precision, and the 'printed date' a stamped code indicating the date the slide was processed. In addition to this, some slides have titles written on them, old identification numbers crossed out, and some information about the type of slide (ie. Kodachrome or Ektachrome transparency). The most informative slides look like:

The other main source of data are the index pages. Each of these handwritten pages contains information about a group of 100 slides, and is our best source for giving the titles that appear next to each of Baly's collections. The rest of the information tends to be briefer than whats written on the slide, but can still be very helpful, especially when there is no title at all written on the slide.

Although we suspect that edits were made to the slides and index pages since the collection's arrival at the Visual Resources Center, whatever edits were made were done without documentation or record. For this reason, we assume whatever is on the slide or index to be the work of Baly himself without significant evidence otherwise.