Digitization Activities

My first couple of blogs focused on born-digital and scanned images created by Federal agencies and accessioned to the Still Picture unit, but I’m now shifting gears and highlighting some of our in-house digitization activities. The main series I’m going to talk about can trace its roots back to 1974 when we received the first of two accessions containing the Forest Service’s general photographic negative file, which they referred to as their Permanent Image Collection. These accessions also included microfilm and a small set of contact prints made by the Forest Service when negatives were deteriorating and/or nitrate. What we didn’t receive were the corresponding prints, mostly mounted, that had been transferred to the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland. These prints, which are arranged by subject categories, provide much easier access to photographs within the series. In 2004, the prints finally arrived and are now in the series, “Photographs Relating to National Forests, Resource Management Practices, Personnel, and Cultural and Economic History, ca. 1897-1980” (National Archives Identifier 651890). Photographs in this series were submitted by Forest Service headquarters and regional photographers for inclusion in the Forest Service’s central photographic library. Images from all of the National Forest Regions, as well as forested areas and forest management practices in foreign countries are included. Subjects include forest management, range management, wildlife management, watershed management, fire control, research, and recreation. As soon as the prints arrived, our digitization lab started on a massive project to digitize all of the prints, which was completed in 2012. No item level metadata was accessioned along with the images so currently researchers must search based on primary and secondary subject categories that are applied to a group of images. For example: “Towns and Cities: Occupied – Wyoming” and “Fire Prevention: CFFP – All States”. The majority of captions are located on the front-side of the mounts and for un-mounted prints the captions are located on the reverse-side, so the entire mount or reverse-side was scanned for each image. Depending on resources available, we plan on going back and adding captions whenever possible, especially for high-profile images. Once these images are loaded into the Online Public Access (OPA) we also encourage researchers and staff to tag images to aid in searching. In the meantime, we are working on posting online a basic list of primary and secondary subject categories to search on. The images are currently available online through the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) and in the Still Picture Research Room.