British Library Photo Archive and Massachusetts Historical Society Photo Archive websites

 

For this assignment I looked at a couple of websites, one was the British Library’s photo archive and the other was the Massachusetts Historical Society’s photo archive. Both websites were well laid out and had nice descriptions of what they have in their collections. I got to the British Library’s photo archive by doing a Google search for “British Library Photo Archive”. When doing this search, the British Library website photo archive section came right up. This webpage is located at: https://imagesonline.bl.uk/?service=page&action=show_home_page

&language=en. On this page, there is a search box called “search images”. I tried searching for historic photographs of London and only got 9 images. This was disappointing as I’m sure the British Library has more historic images of London then that. After that, I decided to try searching just the word “London”. When I did this search, I got 162 pages of images. Not very efficient but at least I got a plethora of results. I got all sorts of images, many were drawings and paintings, but there were also plenty of photographs. Some were of the city of London, and many others were of people, buildings, places, or events (some only vaguely) related to London. Many of the photographs, nevertheless, were beautiful and their collection included daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, calotypes, cabinet cards, cartes-de-visites, etc and many images made with different types of mechanical processes (such as such as halftones, photogravures, lithographs, and others). Most photographs were black and white, though there were some early color photographs as well. One can pull up a photo by clicking on it or by clicking on the magnifying glass icon at the bottom left of each image. The images were mostly fairly well catalogued with subject matter described, person in photograph named, dates or at least ranges, and some information about the type of photograph, publication the photo originally appeared in or the photographer if known (many, of course, were not known).

            After looking through these photographs for a while, I decided that I wanted to try to find something more specific so I returned to the photo search page and tried searching for photographs of London from the 1920s and 1930s. I searched by using the words “London 1920s, 1930s” and I only got a few images mostly of photographs taken from airplanes during aerial bombardments (presumably from the first and second world wars). This was both disappointing as not many images came (only 5) as well as surprising as the aerial bombardments of London took place during the first world war (1914-1918) and the second world war (1939-1945). In saying this, presumably none of these photographs were from the 1920s or 1930s, which were the time periods I specified in my search. So even though I’m pretty sure the British Library has photographs of London from the 1920s and 1930s, I was not able to easily find them.

            At this point, I decided to have a look at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s photo archive. I did a Google search for “Massachusetts Historical Society photo archive” and this brought up the Massachusetts Historical Society’s photo archive website located at: http://www.masshist.org/library_

collections/photographs.cfm. This is how the Massachusetts Historical Society describes its photography collection “The photographic archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society consist of approximately 120,000 photographs. Modern portraits of individuals and family groups, initially acquired with manuscript donations, dominate the collection. Its full breadth, however, spans the history of photography and includes more than 550 daguerreotypes, 100 tintypes, 200 ambrotypes, 4,000 cartes-de-visite, 200 cabinet cards, and 5,000 glass plate negatives, as well as large format prints and thousands of images produced through modern photographic processes.

Approximately 50,000 photographs in 380 separate collections are described at the collection level in 45 online finding aids and in ABIGAIL. All 800 individual cased images in the daguerreotype and ambrotype collections are cataloged in ABIGAIL. Please contact the reference librarian if you do not find a specific photographic item in the online catalog.” With this great description I decided to do a search for photographs of Walden Pond. I clicked on the ABIGAIL search and then typed “Walden Pond photographs” in the search box. I got 2251 pages of results (10 results per page), which was exiting! However, upon closer inspection, I realized that most of the photographs were not actually shown online. One presumably has to actually go into the Mass Historical Society in the Back Bay to look at them. Also, I realized that most of the results were not only photographs but also “mixed media”. I would assume this means that there are photographs, images, documents, etc in each of these listings. Nevertheless, the listings seemed to be fairly well catalogued showing date/date range, author/photographer (if known), publication the photographs and/or documents originally appeared in, and type of image (daguerreotype, ambrotype, tintype, lithograph, etc.).

So in wrapping up, both websites I looked had their advantages and disadvantages, however, it was nice to actually see the photographs in the British Library’s collection. The Massachusetts Historical Society did seem to make finding specific images or subjects of images easier, even if one has to go there to actually look at them. Both search engines gave me either too many only vaguely related results if my search was fairly general or too few results if I was searching for something more specific. Nevertheless, I would probably have more luck with both websites if I were to sink some time into using differing search terms to find what I was looking for. Both websites were beautifully designed and invited the user to have a look at highlights of their collections, which could certainly be fun and useful.