British Library and Peabody Museum

I looked into the photographic collections catalogs at the Peabody Museum (https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/archives?q=node/43) and the British Library (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/photographs/). Both of these collections have some of their more significant or frequently-requested items digitized and available online, but far more of them cataloged without digitization.

The British Library photographs catalog is a work in progress, designed to bring together photographic materials from various departments which have until now been accessed from those departments' separate catalogs, if they were cataloged at all. Photographically illustrated books are treated as collections, and the individual photographs within them are being included in the catalog. There are no links between catalog entries and digitized images (and indeed some of the digitized images are not cataloged), but some are made available through an online gallery here: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/photographicproject/index.html. An individual photograph description includes the department, a shelfmark and print number, the photographer if known, a title, date, process, dimensions in millimeters, additional references numbers (such as a photographer's own negative-numbering scheme), inscription notes, a general note which may include a visual description of the photograph or other information the cataloger found relevant, the geographic location if known, and the portrait subject, if appropriate. The geographic locations use a controlled hierarchical vocabulary, and the photographer and portrait subject names are under authority control. The advanced search allows you to select from drop-down menus for photographer and portrait subject names and photographic processes and do a subsidiary search for authorized place names, as well as keyword searching in the other fields visible in the record. There are several fields not visible in the records that can also be searched from drop-downs: format, genre, subject, historical event, and building. Although these terms are discoverable by using the drop-down menus, I would find them more useful if you could also see which of these terms have been assigned to an individual item. The handling of photographic process identification is particularly good – although in many cases the terms assigned for photographic process are extremely specific (“Salted Paper Print From Calotype Negative”, for instance), the process identifiers are arranged hierarchically so that searching on a more general process category (such as “Silver Printing-Out Paper Print”) will find pictures labeled with the more specific terms.

The photograph record also gives a link to the collection, which in most cases gives a listing of all the cataloged photographs in that collection, along with a link to the collection description. (In some cases, following the link instead gives a message that the collection has not yet been cataloged). The collection-level descriptions are structured to reflect the fact that many of the “collections” are in fact published works in bound volumes. The collection records include the department, shelfmark, author, title, imprint, publication date, photographer or photographers, photographic processes, size range given in millimeters, date and means of acquisition, narrative description, geographic description, and publisher if applicable. The descriptions are quite detailed, covering the type and condition of the binding and means of mounting the photographs, as well as information about number and general subject matter of the photographs and names of individuals represented.

This very detailed cataloging is nice to have – where we have it. The BL has a three-year grant from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and perhaps they will be able to complete cataloging their photograph collection at this level of detail within the time-frame, but it represents a vast quantity of work, and where it is not done the materials remain undiscoverable. (In the case of photographically-illustrated books, the “collection-level” cataloging may for the most part exist in the books catalog, but loose photographs not yet cataloged in this project are quite likely inaccessible.) Starting with collection-level cataloging across the whole of the project and adding item-level records as resources allow would make more materials findable sooner, and leave the project in a better state if the grant proves insufficient to complete it. (P:ACM p. 166). Including links to digital images when they are available would greatly enhance the usefulness of the catalog to remote users.

The Peabody Museum's photographic materials are integrated into its general online catalog, including in many cases a digitized version of the image presented with the item-level catalog entry. The catalog contains both item-level and collection-level descriptions, but they are not linked to one another. In particular, the collection-level descriptions often refer to “P-print” numbers of photographs within the collection, but the item-level descriptions do not have those numbers. Both item and collection-level records contain the catalog number, display title, description (sometimes broken down into “Inventory Description” and “Object Description”), department (which is referred to in the advanced search form as “Collection Type”, and for photographs is always “Photographic”), date, artists, culture/period, geography/provenience, materials, dimensions, and donor. For photographs, the materials field is used to describe the photographic process. The photographic processes are identified in less detail than the British Library images, but the processes are identified to a level commensurate with what we do in class (with the occasional hiccup, such as the image identified as both a daguerreotype and a tintype).  The textual descriptions are much less detailed than those given by the BL, often consisting of only a name or a simple description like "Woman with dog in front of house".