Philadelphia City Archives and Philadelphia Museum of Art

Introduction

For this assignment, I chose to look at how photographs are made accessible and described in the websites of these two organizations:

Philadelphia City Archives (95,287 photographs)

http://www.phillyhistory.org

Philadelphia Museum of Art (4,044 photographs)
http://www.philamuseum.org/

Background Information

Both of these organizations are located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Despite this similarity, both organizations are vastly different in their administrative composition. This has influenced the formation of their photographic collections and resulting presentation online.

The Philadelphia City Archives is maintained by a government body, known as the Philadelphia Department of Records. The City Archives holds an estimated 2 million photographs dating back to the mid-1800s. The photographs were originally created by a photography department within the City of Philadelphia to document the city's activities and to assist city officials in making decisions. Over time, the increasing historic value of these photographs lead the City Archives to begin a digitization project in 2005. After receiving grant funding in 2007, 2008, and 2010, the PhillyHistory site developed to allow users to not only see historic photographs of Philadelphia, but to see the photographs linked to their geographic coordinates on a map. Of the 2 million photographs in their collection, the City Archives has put 95,287 photographs online.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization operated by a board of trustees and a director. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is made up of 8 curatorial departments that care for 227,000 objects. Photographs fall under the "Prints, Drawings, and Photographs" department, which was formed under a different name in 1920. Photographs were not collected until 1949, starting with a gift of 69 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946). In subsequent decades, the collection has grown to include 2,500 photographs by Julian Levy (American, 1906-1981), 4,000 photographs by Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976), and more.  In other words, the collection is comprised of fine art photographs, rather than documentary photographs. While no exact figure of photographs is published online, at least 4,044 photographs have been made searchable online.

Searching the Photographic Collections

Neither of these websites offer finding aids for their collections. Searching through a database of images is the only way to access the photographs.

Philadelphia City Archives

Upon landing on the PhillyHistory home page, searching is encouraged by a big button. There are two interfaces through which to search the Philadelphia City Archives photographs. The default method is the thumbnail view (top image). The other method is the map view (bottom image).

Either method provides the same searching capabilities. Some of the fields users can search by are address, keyword, topic, series, collection, and time period. Users can filter searches by neighborhood, by whether the records have digitized media, and by date that the record of the photograph has been changed.

When a photograph has been selected, a new frame pops up with information about that photograph. The descriptive information includes title, description (usually the same as the title), notes (sometimes a photo depicts a building that no longer exists), address, date, photographers, collection (some photos have been added by other organizations), collection ID, asset ID, topic, and hyperlink (if it relates to a post on their blog).

Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of art is actively engaged in putting photographs online. Because the Philadelphia Museum of Art is home to much more than just photographs, users have to search a bit to find photographs. Upon landing on the Philadelphia Museum of Art website, users have to go to Collections > Search Collections. Then, they are presented with three search methods (top image).

The first search method is to use a blank search bar to search by keyword(s). Users can turn "hints" on or off, much the same way related search results automatically show up in a Google search. Users also have the choice to add special characters here.

The second method is to search by various options such as artist/ maker, classification (format), country of work, and curatorial department. Users can also filter results to records only with a provenance, and records only with audio file. It is through this method that search results can be narrowed down to just show photographs.

The final search method is to search by accession number, which is useful for finding a specific record if a user already knows one.

Upon selecting a photograph to view (bottom image), the information comes as raw data that is not labeled. The information includes curatorial department, title, country of origination, date, process, measurements, whether the photo is on view or not, a unique identifier, provenance, "social tags" added by user, and additional information about the artist or collection.

Conclusion

Photographic collections are seeing new life thanks to the digital revolution. Cross-sector partnerships (such as the Library of Congress and Flickr pairing up in 2008 to create Flick Commons) and special programs (such as the SEPIA Project funded by the European Union from 1999-2003) are being developed to explore the potential power of digital systems to share and manage photographic collections. With online photograph collections have increased in popularity, issues of accessibility remain.

The biggest issue, as seen through the examination of the online photographic collections of the Philadelphia City Archives and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the importance of context. Unlike a finding aid, which groups photographs on a collection level and provides some contextual information, these search methods rely on the user to make associations between photographs. As far as guides go, the Philadelphia Museum of Art only has substantial information about a collection of photographs, such as the Paul Strand collection, if it has been put on exhibit. The Philadelphia City Archives allows users to search through a handful of series  (e.g. Winter Scenes) and collections (e.g. Phila. Water Dept. Photographs), but provides no significant information on these categories. Ultimately, context is the factor lacking in these two organizations.

However, at the item level, the information supplied by both the Philadelphia City Archives and the Philadelphia Museum of Art is not drastically different. Both organizations try to supply sufficient information for their records in a consistent manner. More than anything, the interfaces through which a user interacts is the primary difference. For the Philadelphia City Archives, whose photographs depict the city throughout history, the method of searching visually by a map presents photos in a more dynamic context than they would be otherwise. While the Philadelphia Museum of Art also provides a small map to denote where the photograph was produced, it  is not as important for their photographic collections.

To conclude, the challenge of providing context at the collection and item levels is shared by agencies big and small, private and public. As the trend to share photographs online grows, so too will our understanding of the best approaches to help users retrieve contextual information pertinent to photographic collections.