The following is a joint post by Lara Szypszak and Julie Stoner, Reference Technicians, Prints and Photographs Division.
There are many ways to run across fantastic images in Prints and Photographs Division holdings, often in the course of carrying out day-to-day tasks.
When digital technology came along in the 1990s, the Prints and Photographs Division digitized its collection of some 90,000 copy negatives, which represented items researchers had purchased copies of over the course of many years. Expecting that images that researchers wanted to reproduce would be of interest to others, we scanned these as a collection of “best hits” of sorts. The digital images aided access and reproduction but, alas, there was no magic solution to converting into an online search tool the corresponding 90,000 caption cards that provide access in our reading room. Instead, the division used “digital display records” to put the images online, to make them searchable by their reproduction number, and to lead researchers back to the reading room card indexes that describe the images.
For several years now, staff have been working to improve access by keying in the old caption cards, such as the one above, to make searchable records. When we joined the reference staff in 2015, we began working on this retrospective conversion project. Below, you can see an example of a digital display record and the catalog record that we created to make the image more findable.
As we have gone through the individual images over the years, we have come across many photos that stood out for being of historical significance such as the image of General George Custer and Grand Duke Alexis below.
We also noticed Frances Benjamin Johnston popped up in the project; from picnicking to camel riding, she certainly got around, and didn’t mind being photographed, herself!
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![Tourists [F.B.J., front seated, with friends?] posed on camel. Photo, 1901. hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a36292](http://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/files/2017/07/3a36292u.jpg) |
Other photographs, such as the ones below, simply tickled our fancy or left us in awe!
As the project continues to progress, we are sure more pictorial gems will make their way to light.
Learn More:
- Read more about more ways that the Prints and Photographs Division utilizes card catalogs in the blog post “Flipping through the Card Catalog.”
- In addition to photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston, the division holds many photographic prints and negatives by her – have a look at a sampling and learn more about her career.
- Beyond the sloth, Eadward Muybridge recorded a wide array of humans and animals in motion. Read about his pioneering efforts in an earlier blog post and view a variety of the images.
Comments (8)
You have misspelled Frances Benjamin Johnston’s name twice in the above photos. “Francis” is male. “Frances” is female.
Thanks for pointing out the misspelling of Frances’s name—we were so taken with seeing her in action that we missed that detail. We corrected the spelling.
Love this blog posting! I work in a public library and follow this blog.
Love this blog! I work in a public library and read all the postings.
Thank you!
Are the sloth photos supposed to be upside down and backwards?
Thanks for pointing this out. We looked at the original album, and you’re exactly right, indeed we’ve got the sloth upside down! We’ll look to address this in the record.
Thanks for this great article. But I do have a question. Why when I enter the title of the photo “street chasm after san francisco earthquake” in the search box at the top of this page does the photo not appear in the search results?
Yet when I enter the same search term in the PPOC search box, I can find it.
What is the difference between the two catalogs? And why so few subject headings in the MARC record?
I’m just a local history librarian trying to figure all of this out!
Thanks.
Good eye! Due to the way our catalog records are created and updated, they first appear in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, and are then collected and transferred into the overall Library of Congress catalog. This process can take a bit of time, and the San Francisco photo may be in the in-between stages. The Library of Congress catalog, accessed on the Library of Congress homepage contains materials from throughout the Library, while the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog reflects the holdings of the Prints and Photographs Division.
As this particular project is essentially the conversion of caption cards to brief records, the addition of subject headings is outside the scope of the work. We always hope to improve and expand our records as staff time and resources permit.
Thanks for your comment!