Leodis latest content

[blackprince]

I regularly check the latest content at Leodis for interesting new photographs.
The last couple of times I get nothing but photocopies of playbills and tickets for music performances in Leeds over the years.
Reading into it, Leeds libraries are in the process of uploading about 5000 playbills to the site. ( What next restaurant menus and football programmes ?)

The title of Leodis was a photographic archive of Leeds when it was set up in 1999. I am sure that playbills and other ephemeral printed matter could have their own website but it seems daft to me to mix the 2 together and divert resources away from the core purpose of Leodis.

And before anyone asks, yes I have contacted Leeds Libraries with my thoughts on this and received a pleasant but anodyne reply.

[Leodian]

Hi blackprince. I noticed them yesterday and did think there was a lot but so far only 4 pages! I guess someone kept them so I wonder if he/she went to all of the events.

[blackprince]

Hi Leo,
They are now adding tickets to the collection of 5000 Playbills owned & copyrighted by Leeds libraries.
When you do a search on the whole database they can be filtered out. But you can no longer see the most recent photos added to the site - all you get is tickets. They are adding so many tickets that the latest photos added , if any, just disappear quickly.
They say Leodis has never just been about the photographs despite being called"A photographic archive of Leeds" since 1999, well you could have fooled me!

BP

[jma]

I believe the Leodis archive is funded by grants from the National Lottery so I presume that depends on bids for funding periodically. I also presume that the lottery funding is not unlimited so there's an element of competition in the bidding for grants. I could imagine a bid based on the material blackprince is objecting to might miss out when up against something of a less specialist interest.

[blackprince]

Hi jma, I don't object to the new material as such. Tickets and playbills are not my bag but I am sure lots of people will be interested. It is the decision, misguided in my view, to mix the tickets and photographs on the same site which I object to.
At one time I designed and managed 4 or 5 of my own websites on diverse topics ranging from a photography club to hikes in the Alps. Each site had its own design theme and its own separate domain. If I followed the logic of the Leodis administrators I should have just dumped all the information into one mish-mash of a site and said to users you can sort out what you want to look at by using filters in the search facility.