Photographic Collections in Massachusetts and California

Introduction:
I looked at two different archive collections from across the country: the Massachusetts Historical Society's photograph collections, and the California State Parks Photographic Archives. The difference between the two in terms of ease of use and helpful information was pretty staggering.

Massachusetts Historical Society:
The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) has quite a few photographs in its collection. Depending on your topic, there are a few ways of searching for photographs that you’re interested in.

First, I chose to search their Collections area. Using their online resources, I was able to choose a collection by subject, era, or medium.

Because I’m interested in the photograph collections, searching by medium seemed the best, and easiest, way to go about it. This brought me to a page of the ten online collections they had available, arranged by subject.  Each online collection brings the user to a new website, and each website is arranged a little differently, so a user would need to be alert to any of the small changes.

For example, the Photographs of Native Americans collection is very well arranged and easy to navigate. Users are first brought to a homepage that explains what the collection has to do with Massachusetts, the scope of the collection, and a little about the medium. In this instance, most of the photographs of Native Americans are cartes de visites. There is a brief explanation of what those are and who popularized them.  A user who is looking at the photographs of Native American collection would be able to choose from the subseries of the collection, shown on the sidebar. Each subseries has an introduction to the photographs, a blurb about the photographers, and a blurb about the collectors.

 
Users can then click on a photograph for an enlarged image.  The photographs are titled, attributed to a photographer when possible, identified by photograph type (carte de visite, tintype, etc.) and given a date or approximate date. They do not list size of photographs, though. Although I know the approximate size of a carte de visite, not all users will.

Another collection, Marion Hooper Adams’ Selected Photographs and Letters, is another easy to use collection. The homepage explains who Marion Hooper Adams was and describes how the website is set up. Her photographs are presented to the user the same way they are presented in her album. The title of the photograph is displayed along with a transcription of any handwritten captions.

Users can select an image to enlarge, then choose to read the full caption. The full caption includes the photographer, the approximate year of the photo, the size of the album page and the size of the photo. There is no information as to the type of photograph it is, though most users probably won’t be interested in that information. Again, this collection was quite easy to navigate, and all the photos were together, making it easy for users to browse. At the bottom of the page is a link to the collection guide. The guide gives details on acquisition information and the way the collection is organized. It also provides links to any related material, which is definitely something users would find convenient. There is also a note about restrictions on access to some of the material, and how researchers can work around it.

Users who do not use the collection guides can search ABIGAIL, MHS’s online catalog. Users who have a specific subject they are researching, like “Native Americans,” can do a keyword or subject search while limiting the results to only visual materials. If any of the search results seem useful, users can select the title, which takes them to the full bibliographic record of the collection which houses the photographs. The bibliographic record provides a link to the collection’s finding aid. This is really easy to navigate; there’s no searching for something that may be useful. The MHS seems to have a clear idea of how users navigate webpages, and they design them accordingly. The finding aids are all really well organized, too, providing not only information on the collection, but stating upfront where users could find related material. Within the finding aid, links are provided to the images that are available online. Titles, names, dates, and photographers are provided where possible. Many of the photographs also have type of photograph listed.

Overall, the Massachusetts Historical Society has a great online presence. Their webpages are easy to navigate and are full of useful information on the photographers and photographs. They don’t seem to assume that users will know anything about photographs, so they provide the information. They explain the difference between a daguerreotype and a tintype, they describe how the carte de visite became popular, and they note where well-known photography studios were located. The titles they give the photographs are also usefully descriptive, so users know what the photograph is without having to see it.

California State Parks Photographic Archives:

The California State Parks Photographic Archives is as far different from the Massachusetts Historical Society photograph collections as it’s possible to be. The archive is a part of the California state parks department, and its web presence consists of a few pages on the government website. There doesn’t seem to be any way for users to conduct a search of just the archives using keywords or subject word searches. Instead, users are forced into a far more cumbersome search with unsatisfactory results.

Users who find the photographic archives page of the website find a short introduction to the archive, the scope of the collections, and information about contacting the archive for research purposes. User can then choose a link on the sidebar to the “Guide to the Photographic Archives.” Here, the user finds a few more details about what subjects they can expect to find in the photographic archives. The webpage mentions that the finding aid is currently being updated, but that there are images that exist digitally, in JPEG and TIFF formats. Unfortunately, there is no easy way for the user to find these images.

Instead, there are links to the Photographic Archives Guide. The guide is broken up into seven sections: Introduction, Park Index, Subject Index, Aerial Index, Fungi and Plant Index, Animal Index, and Song Index. Choosing one of these links opens a new page. The Park Index, for example, lists the parks in alphabetical order by their current name. There’s a legend at the beginning of the document noting what the abbreviations stand for.

Because it is in a document form, the legend is not very useful to users who have not printed it out. It is irritating to have to scroll to the beginning of the document every time I want to decipher what I’m reading.  The collection information itself is bare bones: whether it contains a general album or an historic album, any unbound prints, the number of photos, and the number of slides.

Some of the collections are marked with an asterisk to inform the user that the park’s photographic prints have been scanned and entered in the Photographic Archives Image Database. This information doesn’t seem very helpful to the user, considering there is no link to the database, either from the index or from the Photographic Archives webpage.

The other indexes are just a list of the names of plants, fungi, animals, or campfire songs, with no indication of whether there are photographs of them or how many photographs, or the size, or anything.

However, back on the homepage for the Photographic Archives, users can select a link for California State Parks Online Museum Collections. Here, users can search for images of photographs, but it's still not easy. Users can search the catalog or they can look through a list of the collections. Users who use the catalog can narrow their search to photography, but that's where the useful part ends. The results that appear from the search don't have titles. They have item numbers and dates and the caption "photographic image," which is redundant when one has searched only the photographic images.

Selecting an image for a closer look gives a little more detail, like the photographer and the medium. A description of the image assures the user that it's only a copy of the actual photograph that they're seeing. Overall, the detail is quite underwhelming. The users don't know if all the images are part of a collection, or what collection they are in. There's no background on the pictures, so, for instance, many users may not realize that the pictures of Native Americans are from a movie set unless they read the subject terms.

Users who search the collections should know what they are looking for. The collections are listed in alphabetical order, which means the collections with photographs are scattered throughout the page. Under the title for each collection is a brief note about the collection. The notes do not always tell the user what they can expect to find in the collection, though. The "Historical Photographs of the Original Camp Taylor" collection, for example, explains a little who Samuel P. Taylor was and why he's important to California's state parks, but it doesn't tell me how many photographs are in the collection, what years does it cover, who the photographers were, or really anything about the collection. Like with the photographs of Native Americans, the ones in the Camp Taylor collection have no title and many of the dates are as vague as "after 1884." For this particular collection, even selecting an image doesn't provide much more information. There is no note on the photographer and no description of the image.

Conclusion:
No doubt about it, the California State Parks department doesn't have a very useful website for their photographic archives. They didn't provide much information about either the collections or the photographs. Researchers would be very frustrated trying to get information from them. In contrast, the MHS is a dream for searchers to navigate. The information is detailed and thorough, and the Society provides an easy pathway for users to follow.