In 2000, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson (which houses my archives) published a comprehensive bibliography of my writings. The continuation and expansion of this bibliography began while the CCP volume was in production. I converted that book’s entries into database records in a FileMaker Pro db solution, and have logged in more than 900 new items already. As of this writing (September 2017) it includes over 2600 entries.
The 1968-95 bibliography primarily annotates my own writings; unlike many bibliographies, with few exceptions, it doesn’t list or describe references to and comments on my work in the work of others, reviews of my books, and other items of interest to researchers. In the post-1995 continuation of the bibliography now underway, such entries already do exist. Furthermore, I’ve commenced logging into that database such items from the period 1968-95, with the intent of slowly playing catch-up, in the hope of progressively fleshing out the entire bibliography with all the components that researchers find helpful in such a compilation.
There’s where I need help. Specifically, I need someone with access to the kinds of online databases to which college, university, and institutional libraries subscribe, who can (a) confer with a librarian and construct a sophisticated series of searches to collect references to my work, (b) get that same librarian’s help in importing those into database records in standard bibliographic format, and then (c) start the process of locating the texts so that we can annotate the entries.
Here are links to the PDF downloads at this website:
Here’s a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader utility to open those PDF files.
Titled A. D. Coleman: A Bibliography of His Writings on Photography, Art, and Related Subjects from 1968 to 1995, this compilation makes available the basic bibliographic information (title, publication, volume, issue, page numbers, etc.) on over 1350 essays, books, monograph and catalogue introductions, and other publications of mine during that 27-year period. It also includes letters to the editor of the periodicals covered that pertain to my writings therein, and published interviews with me during those years. Each of the 1453 entries comes accompanied by a brief synopsis of the essay’s content. The entire bibliography is extensively indexed, making information retrieval relatively simple.
The CCP and I decided to make this research tool available in two primary forms. The first was a reasonably priced, traditional printed version, the third such volume in the Center’s line of published bibliographies. This has since officially gone out of print.
As a service to the educational and scholarly community, we’ve also chosen to publish it in a second form: as a pair of PDF files, posted here as free downloads. The first file contains all the printed version’s textual front matter: essays by myself, project editor Nancy Solomon, and former CCP Director Terence Pitts. The second file contains all the bibliographic entries and the index. This gives you the complete bibliography in electronic form (minus a few illustrations), indexed and also searchable. If you don’t already have it, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader or some comparable application to open it.
Eventually I’ll post the Filemaker Pro database version at the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, updating it periodically until it’s current (within a month or so, anyhow). Webmaster John Alley and I feel close to having a system for that process streamlined. This will make a greater variety of sorts and searches possible than what the current PDF format facilitates.
When I post the eventual bibliography update, I’ll include a handy form that anyone can use to submit an entry. Any substantial help in retrieving this information will earn its suppliers a mention in the credits for that update. But even the provision of information on a single reference helps. My thanks in advance to any and all who contribute to that project.
— A. D. Coleman
