MCNY vs. NYPL

The two repositories I decided to compare are Museum of the City of New York and New York Public Library. I chose MCNY because I interned there this summer and am familiar with their websites and wanted to discuss the pros and cons of their catalogs and finding aids. 



For MCNY, they add their photographs to their Collections Portal website: http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=Home. They recently upgraded the Portal and now you have better precision with your searches. If you type in a specific subject into the search bar, a sidebar pops up with the ability to refine your search with a specific type of photographer, object type, and borough. And when you click on the photographs, the information provided is very detailed. The title of the photographs, the photographer, the date, the organization that funded the project if there was one, the type of photograph, the size of the photograph, they have the photo identification for the museum's database, and they have keyword tags. They also allow you to view related galleries of photographs that contain similar images with tags for those galleries.  I believe they use LCSH for their subject headings. I think they do a pretty good job of describing the photographs, although some may argue that by using LCSH, they are decreasing access to these photographic collections because they are not letting their users tag the photographs themselves.

 However, there are no finding aids. The finding aids for the museum collections are located in a separate website: http://mcnycatablog.org/ and there are no finding aids for photograph collections up (or many for manuscript collections, for that matter) that it almost makes you wonder whether it's even worth knowing about this other site. There has recently been a push (by the museum's archivists) to process collections at MCNY at the collection level instead of item level. The finding aid I worked on this summer were at the collection and item level but ultimately, you have to understand who is accessing these collections. At museums, unless there is a research room/library connected to the museum, most of the people who are accessing these collections are curators, other museum staff, and even outside museums/companies who wish to buy reproductions of prints. If you are putting up an exhibition, and need to find specific items to fit in with your exhibition, it makes more sense to process collections and describe them at the item level instead of collection level.
If someone wanted to know what kind of photographic collections they have at the museum, they would have to search the Collections Portal and then email the archivist to see what was available. People can only access the collections by appointment and if a research need is shown. Overall, MCNY is trying to find a happy medium for providing access to information on their (photographic) materials but it is still a process for them.

As quite a few of us saw on Monday, NYPL doesn't have finding aids for their photography collections, which is a problem. Their photography collections are spread across multiple divisions and it is unfortunate that there is no way of knowing how their photographic collections are arranged within these specific divisions.

While there are no finding aids for these collections, NYPL does do a decent job of presenting information on the volume, date, format, a small description of the collection, and other resources that may be useful to people viewing this collection. When you do click on the links to the "finding aid" it brings you to a catalog which bring up records on photographs. I clicked on one collection in particular, "On Stage and Screen: Photograph File of the Billy Rose Theater Collection" and there was a Collection Guide, stating the Collection History and Related Subjects to view the collection. No finding aid but it still gets kudos for including collection history and subject subdivisions. When you click on a photograph, the NYPL gives you the creator (photographer), title, Source (or Collection), Location, Digital ID, Record ID, and when the digital record was published/updated. There are no tags, no keywords attached to the record, so it makes it difficult to find these photographs. I would also like to see more information about the image like what type of photograph is it and what the size is. There is a print and buy option that NYPL offers when you click on individual images, so I think size would probably be important to disclose to people who want to buy reproductions of the image.


Overall, I think these two repositories have a long way to go to make their collections accessible. While one (MCNY) needs to decide who their target audience is, the other needs to decide how to describe their photographic collections so that more people can access them.