Denver Public Library Digital Collections & The Museum of the Rockies Photo Archive Online

Denver Public Library Digital Collections & The Museum of the Rockies Photo Archive Online

The repositories of the Denver Public Library and the Museum of the Rockies conveniently have online access to their photographic collections, apart from other materials. http://digital.denverlibrary.org/cdm/photographs/

http://www.morphotoarchive.org/index.php

The DPL separates their collections by format, describing “photographs” as a single collection, rather than a format for which several collections may be classified. Within this grouping of photographs, users will find a division of categories, such as “Native Americans,” and a search bar option. These categories seem like they should be collections, but there is no descriptive evidence to support this. The “Wild West Show” category is certainly a group of photographs involving Bill Cody’s traveling show, but there is no overview of this assemblage, which suggests that they are only displayed together due to their similar subject. It was not until I selected an individual image that I found it was described as “part of” a specific collection. I appreciated that the image contained a link to the collection, but found it troubling that I had to reach it in this manner. 

The site itself appears at first glance to be very well done with aesthetically pleasing layouts, but navigation of the photographs feels very backwards. Without a specific search topic in mind, a user must start with the pre-defined categories, which will take them to several browsing options: either viewing images individually, or narrowing the search by subject, date, creator, or format-medium. It can get very confusing, very quickly. 

The way the DPL describes the individual images is almost very well done. Clicking on a thumbnail takes the user to a new page allowing close-up zooming on any part of the photograph. The descriptive material is very thorough about what the image is, with information about the creation of the image, the subject matter, and even the condition of the physical photograph. However, as Abebe Rorissa put it, “ofness” is very different from “aboutness.” The DPL does little, if anything, to describe what their images or collections are about. Perhaps they wanted to avoid giving too subjective interpretations, but without this information, users are left to navigate as Cara Finnegan did, seeking answers to the question she described as unanswerable: “what is this a picture of?”

Finally, users might find the overuse of hyperlinks to be frustrating. I believe it is a useful idea to contain links within subject descriptions that will lead viewers to similar collections, but the DPL has somehow managed to link every single word. In one image the description contains the phrase, “a fruit packing warehouse is behind them.” The only words not linked in this phrase are “a” and “them.” A user seeking images of fruit packing in the 1900’s might find links to “fruit packing” useful, unfortunately it is unlikely anyone will find what they want through the separate links for “fruit” and “packing.” What is really strange is the tagging of words such as, “behind” and “sat,” yet examples like this happen in every photo on the site.

Overall, the DPL could use some work arranging and describing their photographic collections. The Museum of the Rockies, however, has an excellent set-up.

While the MOR’s site does not contain a search bar, it does have several divisions of search categories users may find helpful. It looks much more dated and much less attractive than the DPL layout, but the beautiful images and their clear descriptions make up for this.

Users can search the database by subject, location, date, surname, photographer, or by text and catalog number. There is also a separate browsing section arranged by collection. Collections contain an opening page with an overview of information to allow users to read briefly what the collection contains and decide if it will be of interest to them. This makes for more efficient searching and cuts back on the time users would otherwise spend scrolling through pages of images. 

Subjects are extensive, arranged alphabetically and following Library of Congress headings. The MOR could improve on this by adding a search bar, or at least a top menu of the alphabet so users do not have to scroll so far down. Scrolling is one of the most frustrating tasks for online searchers who are not interested in browsing. However, that small inconvenience is the only issue I find with this online archive.

Individual description of the photographs is superb. The titles are clear and appropriate and the descriptions seem to give as much information as possible so users know that any missing information was not left out intentionally, but because it remains unknown. Also, photographer names, format, collection sources, and access points are supplied as useful and relevant tags.

I chose two repositories from the same relative geographic location in order to compare how the similar materials would be presented. While I was disappointed with the Denver Public Library, I still think they are doing a much better job than some of the other sites I have tried to navigate. The Museum of the Rockies works very well, but should remember that the internet has a strong bias for aesthetics and would do well to upgrade its appearance. Each repository must find a descriptive standard that works best for their unique collections, but it is important to remember the internet is a melting pot of searching experiences and all users should be able to find what they need, and understand what it is when they find it. Without this understanding, what is the point of allowing online access to archival collections?

26 Thought Provoking Photographs

My friend just posted this and I thought that people would interested in seeing these pictures:
http://indulgd.com/26-of-the-most-thought-provoking-photographs-of-all-time/

52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 3: Talbot’s Photogenic Drawing in The Pencil of Nature | Echoes from the Vault

52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 3: Talbot’s Photogenic Drawing in The Pencil of Nature | Echoes from the Vault:

'via Blog this'

A Civil Rights Photographer, and a Struggle, Are Remembered - NYTimes.com

A Civil Rights Photographer, and a Struggle, Are Remembered - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Historic New England & Detroit Historical Society

For this assignment, I took a look at how photographs were handled at two different institutions: Historic New England and Detroit Historical Society.  My primary interest was to see how their photographs were represented in relation to their larger collections, but I also made an effort to analyze the item level descriptions as well.  

After selecting the “Photography” collection at Historic New England, one is presented with a list of categories to choose from, such as agriculture, education, and recreation.  Clicking on any of these will lead one to a list of thumbnail images with titles and brief descriptions to the side.  This is clearly designed for those wishing to do no more than browse the collection.  Those coming with a specific image in mind would need to use the search bar.

Trying to figure out the whether or not a photograph is part of a larger collection is rather difficult.  Most of the images found by browsing are described to be in the “General Photographic Collection, 1860’s – 2000’s.”  It was difficult to tell if this is because only the general collection has been digitized or if the section arranged by category only includes this collection.  I suspect the latter.  At any rate, the bottom of each record allows one to navigate through the records hierarchical arrangement.  This was useful for putting individual photographs into context, but because its representation denies the existence of sibling records, it was much more difficult to make connections between photographs.  Perhaps the print version would be more useful in that regard, however, for the purposes of this assignment, this method of structuring the data was not as useful.

The photographs found by browsing the general photograph collection were extremely descriptive. Often their titles alone answered contextual collections regarding place, time, and subject.  Their access terms included both descriptive terms and subjects. Whether or not their descriptive terms were provided by catalogers or through researcher’s comments was unclear.  Their choice of controlled vocabulary was not evident either, but regarding the items that I looked at, they seemed to be comprehensive.

Some of the descriptions made it clear that arrangement for many years must have been based on subject and format.  The example below shows this.  Note that the Location field description mimics the collection hierarchy.

While one can easily navigate through the subject-based photographs, collections that have remained intact are not so easy.  The Nathaniel L. Stebbins Collection, for example, is arranged and described at the collection-level quite similar to DACS.  The finding aid is missing some key elements, though, namely an access or alternative form description.  There are four series based on photographic format, but it is not apparent which of them are available to be viewed online.  Even after one clicks through all of them until they find the series that does have images, the images are arranged by negative number.  This is obviously useless unless the researcher happens to know the specific negative in advance.

Something else that bothered me about the collection was the disconnect between the photographs and the rest of their materials.  Though their catalog was integrated, I found a particular photograph with a description that was attributed to the Marrett Family Papers, but searching the Marrett finding aid provided no clue as to where the image fit in with the rest of the materials.  The description associated with the photograph record read “Inscription from the Marrett Family Papers,” but aside from this note there was nowhere else in the record that would suggest that it belonged with the Marrett Collection.

After looking at Historic New England’s website, I turned to the Detroit Historical Society.  Searching their collections begins with a search bar, though they also cater to those wishing to browse through a “random images” button at the top of the page.  This felt a bit less rigid than Historic New England, but it also lost precision.  I suppose the search bar made up for this.

The descriptions were less comprehensive than the first site.  “Descriptive terms” and “Subjects” were replaced by “Search terms.”  Some of these search terms were linked and could be followed to a new page of associated records while others were not.  They did not use any evident controlled vocabulary, though the search terms often included visible landmarks or businesses.  Above all, street names were used most often:

“Description: Black and white photograph showing an aerial view from above Michigan Avenue near the John C. Lodge Freeway, looking southwest. To the left are the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit River. To the right are Tiger Stadium and Michigan Central Station. Streets include Bagley, Porter, Abbott, Howard, and W Lafayette Boulevard.”

In spite of the detailed geographic descriptions, all of the photographic records lacked a title field.  In lieu of a title field, the unique identifier was used instead.  While the descriptions often made up for the lack of a title, it did make it difficult to navigate the records to figure out what collection or donation they were associated with.

After a while, I was able to locate a photo album though it took some detective work to find it since I essentially had to use the Object ID numbers to piece it together.  Each page was treated as a separate item, complete with its own description, including the table of contents.  It was rather complicated getting to the point where I could piece the entire thing together, but once I did, I was both impressed and shocked at the effort put in to represent the entire album.  

It should be noted that the only reason I was able to make my way through their catalog was because they use the same database system as my current employer.  I had never seen the front-end of Past Perfect’s catalog because the Martha’s Vineyard Museum does not pay for this service, and so I did not initially realize what I was looking at. 

After realizing their catalog was powered by Past Perfect, some weird idiosyncrasies within individual records began to make sense.  For example, I noted that some of the search terms were linked while others were not.  Past Perfect allows for creation of internal authority files, but they must be created by a user with the proper database permissions to do so.  Therefore, some terms if entered exactly as they appeared in the authority file version would automatically become linked to associated records, while others, even if used multiple times across different records, would never link together because an authority file was never created.  The same thing happened with both the “creator” and “people” fields.

The lack of a title field is probably also symptom of Past Perfect; different types of collections (e.g., photographs and archives) sometimes use different fields that can potentially mean the same thing depending on how they are used (Scope and Content, Summary, Description).  It can be a real problem when trying to legitimately integrate mixed material collections.  The result is that sometimes a Past Perfect cataloger must choose the best option for an entry instead of the field they actually want.  The selection of which fields would be visible to researchers was probably based on some of these difficult decisions and the title field was almost certainly a casualty.

The biggest thing I learned from analyzing the collections of these two institutions was how difficult it is to intellectually integrate photographs with other archival materials in a digital collection.  Perhaps if photographs had not been processed separately initially, these problems would not be as big as they are in the digital environment. Unfortunately the past cannot be changed, but I will need to keep these problems in mind for the future.