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DF Archive |
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The Drachen Foundation's extensive archive exists mainly in a two-dimensional format, to better support the organization's mandate to diffuse information about kites worldwide. Photo documentation is much easier to collect, study, copy, and distribute than are three-dimensional artifacts. The Drachen Foundation archive does include a collection of choice kites, kite-making tools (often hand-made), and related paraphernalia. It has collected examples of kites important in the early history of weather prediction and in the development of aeronautics. It also collects representative and unusual examples of contemporary kites. In the historic category, Drachen owns the largest holding of kites and artifacts of Samuel Franklin Cody, the American aviation pioneer of the turn of the nineteenth century who built and flew the first airplane in England. It holds an original tetrahedral kite cell from inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who became interested in flight in his mid-seventies. It has a large holding of cultural kites from Japan, Cambodia, India, Laos and China (among other countries), a substantial trove of the royal kites of Thailand, and fifteen Korean fighters more than a century old. It also has contemporary examples of traditional leaf kites from Oceania, probably among the first kites ever made. Drachen also assembles artifacts associated with kite flying—stamps, postcards, coins, paintings, drawings, posters, cartoons, porcelains, pins, decorative objects, oddments. In addition to the three-dimensional artifacts described above, the archive includes personal papers on kites and kite-makers as well as books, newsletters, videos, compact discs, and photographic slides on kiting. Drachen works exclusively with copies of originals. Originals are stored in conformance with professional conservation practices, as prescribed by the American Society of Archivists and Conservationists. All archive material can be studied by appointment at the Study Center in Seattle. Research service is also available. Although most Drachen material is freely available to the public for non-commercial use, permission to reproduce material must be obtained from the foundation. Parts of the Drachen archive are available on this website. Click below for descriptions and images of specialized collections within the archive. The foundation continues work to enable access to more of its archive via the Internet.
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