Records of the Royal College of Art, 1896-ongoing, comprising administrative records, including governing body minutes, 1896-ongoing; staff records, 1930s-ongoing and student records, 1898-ongoing; annual reports, 1937-1959 (incomplete) and 1968-ongoing (complete); prospectuses, 1898-2014 (incomplete); press cuttings, 1940s-1999; exhibition catalogues, 1930s-ongoing, including degree-show catalogues, 1972-ongoing; student magazines, 1896-ongoing, including the RCA Students' Magazine, 1911-1915 (first series), 1921-1924 (second series), and ARK magazine, 1950-1977; publications including the books of the Graphic Design department's Lion and Unicorn Press, 1952-c1984, the Illustration department's Inklings imprint, 1971-1995, and miscellaneous departmental publications, 1950s-ongoing. Manuscript material includes correspondence, minutes and accounts relating to the operations of ARK magazine and the Lion and Unicorn Press. A photographic collection contains images relating to the history of the College and examples of students' work, 1910s-ongoing, including over 5,000 prints; a separately administered photographic record of student work contains c40,000 slides of installation shots of student work exhibited in the degree shows, 1961-1978 (incomplete), 1979-2002 (complete), and upwards of 60,000 born-digital images, 2003-ongoing.
Royal College of ArtPapers of L. Bruce Archer (1922-2005) comprising diaries, correspondence, conference proceedings, memoranda, offprints, lecture notes and other teaching materials. The archive is organised into five sections:
(1) Affiliations and posts;
(2) Lectures and articles;
(3) Conferences and events;
(4) Other projects;
(5) Miscellaneous correspondence and printed matter.
Among the key affiliations of Archer's career, some of the best represented include the Royal College of Art (c1974-2002; his detailed 'daily logs' provide description and analysis of College operations in the 1970s and 1980s), Hochschule für Gestaltung (c1960), and Ohio State University (1980-90).
Documentation of conference proceedings include schedules and printed literature and, in some cases, transcripts of papers delivered. Conferences covered include DATER (1991), ICED'81 (1981), and Culture.Space.History (Middle East Technical University, 1990). Teaching materials include a wide range of lectures from the 1960s to the 1990s, arranged by audience/institution, or subject. The archive also includes a series of VHS videos, prepared for the Indian Institute of Technology (n.d.). The 'hospital bed' project is represented through various tangential papers in different sections of the archive.
Archer, Leonard Bruce (1922-2005)