The following is a guest post by Mitsuko Brooks, an Archives, History and Heritage Advanced (AHHA) intern at the Library of Congress. Brooks is in her final semester as a student at Queens College (CUNY) working towards a Master of Library Science degree with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials. This fall I worked in the Prints & Photographs Division on projects that combined visual literacy and subject indexing to improve the descriptions of images in online collections. One of my projects involved revising summary notes and adding subject headings to catalog records for War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographs that depict the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. This photo of Little Tokyo was taken…
Tag: Melissa Lindberg
New Research Guide: Navigating for Images of Ships
The following is an interview with Jon Eaker, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division, about the subject of his research guide: Ships: Navigating for Images at the Library of Congress. Melissa: What is the most challenging thing about finding images related to ships in the collections? Jon: When searching the digitized collections in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, the most difficult thing is that we often copied the image’s title as it appeared on the item and many didn’t include a ship’s prefix (SS, USS, HMS, etc). For some ships with unique names it’s not much of a problem, but for ones with more generic names it can be an issue. A ship named America (of which there have…
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, but You’ve Got to Have One or Two to Start With
The following is a guest post by Taren Ouellette, Digital Library Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. With 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection was a U.S. Government effort to capture scenes of American life during the 1930s and 1940s with such topics as the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and the beginnings of World War II. Half of the collection had accompanying context and titles provided by the FSA/OWI office, but over 70,000 images were not given captions. The Prints & Photographs Division (P&P) has been working to make those “Untitled” images more accessible since the complete film collection was first digitized in the 1990s. You may have noticed some of these untitled images…